The construction industry is in the midst of a transformation. Once hesitant to embrace change, contractors are digitizing their operations to keep pace with industry demands and succeed among tightening margins, rising costs, increasingly complex projects and labor challenges — and even unforeseen global events.

Advances in technology have opened the door to turning massive amounts of project data into insights that ensure your business is competitive, runs efficiently and is highly profitable. Yet, too many contractors are still burdened by a reliance on multiple, disconnected software systems to handle different construction needs like accounting, project management or field management — this locks up data and prevents contractors from using it to understand their business performance — and grow.

As one of your most valuable assets, the data you need to run your business today isn’t what it once was. It’s evolving and so are the mechanisms to gather, analyze and act on it.

In the past decade, many contractors have invested in ERP software and other programs to help manage their business better. Yet, they still experience the same pains that hold their business back.

Disconnected, locally-hosted systems mean data is inconsistent, unreliable and can’t be shared in real time across project teams without heavy customizations or tedious manual reporting methods that require IT, analyst or expert help. This inability to accurately capture data in real time from the office to the field has a far-reaching ripple effect. Reports are not consistent and it’s cumbersome, if not impossible, to glean valuable insights from data.

The situation is compounded as additional unintegrated point software solutions are used as band-aids to fill gaps that continue to widen. Before long, separate systems run accounting reports, labor tracking and projections, and you're stuck using inconsistent or inaccurate data to evaluate projections and make important business decisions. Year after year, your executive team can’t access forward-looking data on business performance and instead, they continue basing decisions on instinct and reactive data.

Usually, we hear that the time and capital invested in the ERP makes it difficult to walk away so they stick it out until one day, they realize the business is in trouble and something has to change.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

Whether you're hesitant to make a change or you're chomping at the bit to become a modern, data-driven contractor, it can be a struggle to understand the best path forward, but it doesn’t have to be. Leading-edge technologies and data-driven vendors like Viewpoint make it easy for today's contractors to democratize, standardize and analyze data — without having to be data scientists themselves.

Data-driven contractors have moved to cloud-based integrated construction software that automatically connects disparate teams and synchronizes data so everyone is working from a single source of truth.

All of a sudden, there is a whole new world of information you can use to manage jobs effectively, among other huge benefits:

• Information is easy to find when they need it and teams waste less time re-entering data or waiting for data from the field
• Anyone in the company can generate accurate and timely reports to monitor project activity and performance
• Powerful projection tools help you better understand project health such as how original estimate, cost-to-date, billings-to-date, total projected costs, open commitments, and more flow through to the contract and work in progress schedules
• Unnecessary overhead costs are reduced and worker abilities are maximized throughout the organization
• Reliable, accurate and real time data makes it possible to better analyze project data and discover ways to significantly boost productivity and profitability
• Predictive analytics help forecast future projects, issues and profitability
• Data analysis helps discover new opportunities to grow and diversify the business

In order to accomplish the above, you can see why selecting the right technology partner is one of the most important decisions you’ll make on the path to improving your construction business better.

• Your technology partner needs to have lived in the dirt
• Your technology partner needs to understand your challenges intimately and how to build solutions to fill those gaps
• Your technology partner needs to be a construction executive turned technologist on your team who is focused on building your results

Viewpoint was building and selling estimating spreadsheets before many of our (and your!) employees were born, who have been in your shoes — and that specific knowledge gained over 40 years of our own construction technology evolution is how your business succeeds is what we brought to bear when we built ViewpointOne.

We built ViewpointOne on a modern infrastructure that leverages cutting-edge technologies like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to ensure your always-on cloud availability, as well as some powerful tech infrastructure solutions maybe you haven’t heard of, like Snowflake and Kafka that allow us to focus on creating simple user experience and adding data computing horsepower.

These technologies ensure that ViewpointOne is easy for your whole organization to use, but also has the power to store and analyze massive amounts of data and can lead customers to cutting edge insights into profit fade, safety, subcontractors and more through sophisticated data models.

But the future is not just about “data,” it's about understanding:

• How and why to track the right data
• How job cost is different than “accounting”
• Factors critical for you to address struggling projects before they're a problem
• Challenges that come with managing change in a disperse and diverse employee group
• Your common workflows — and buildings solutions like ViewpointOne specifically to address them

These are just some of the ways we deeply understand your business, and that's why we want to work with you — to strengthen your business, to strengthen our industry and to help take construction where we know it can go.

To learn more about how ViewpointOne can help your construction company thrive, connect with us today for your own personal evaluation.