How Commodore Builders Leverages Data and Analytics for Better Project, Safety, Schedule, and Estimation Insights
“We are investing more into analytics to help us anticipate risk. We've dabbled in analytic tools, and they're not the easiest thing to use, so when we saw Toric, we saw not only that you could access our data directly from the source but also how easy it was to use.”
Amanda Finnerty, Director of Internal Operations at Commodore Builders
Key Facts
Author Note
Overview
Commodore Builders, based in Boston (USA), is a veteran-owned construction company with an annual revenue of over $550 million. The primary market segment of the company includes commercial, corporate interiors, public, institutional, and life science. The business objectives of Commodore Builders included winning more projects by creating transparency and using data across their business to improve processes and support new company initiatives like their safety program, streamlining complex quantity takeoffs, and improving their scheduling with data and analytics by looking for minor recurring impacts.
To address these goals, executives in the firm enlisted the help and support of Amanda Finnerty, Director of Internal Operations, to source technology and implement a strategy to facilitate accurate and timely reports and dashboards with the right measures or KPIs (key performance indicators) to ensure that the projects are on schedule, within budget, compliant with safety regulations, and adhere to the scope throughout the project’s life cycle.
Given that the fundamental principle of performance management is “what gets measured gets done,” the business value of data and analytics is to offer visibility through the KPIs to evaluate the progress of the measurement entity. Hence Commodore Builders needed a robust project performance dashboard with lagging and leading KPIs that provides accurate and timely insights on cost, schedule, quality, safety, scope, and daily allocations, plus the resource statuses of current and future construction projects. Fundamentally, a KPI is a quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of a measurement entity in meeting its performance objectives. The lagging KPIs help to assess the past state, while the leading KPIs can be used to predict the future state. However, Commodore Builders realized the project performance dashboard was fraught with challenges or problems mainly on two fronts: (a) quality data and insights and (b) user adoption.
Quality data and insights in the context of building a project performance dashboard for Commodore Builders was on integrating diverse data in different formats from the project management system, i.e., Oracle Primavera Cloud (OPC), Procore, Sage 300 CRE (accounting), Excel spreadsheets, Autodesk Revit BIM/CAD applications, SharePoint ECM and more. To address this problem, Commodore Builders built a canonical warehouse as a single source of record (SoR) for deriving insights at the project, program, and portfolio levels.
To help facilitate better access to data, Commodore Builders uses Toric for data ingestion out of their construction technologies for primary construction data sources – including Procore, OPC, and Revit – to build accurate and timely dashboards and reports, all in one place. This allows various business and non-technical users to work with data in a user-friendly environment without requiring coding knowledge. As a result, different project and business stakeholders can access data consistently to quickly derive insights and create/share visualizations or insights with other team members.
Challenge
Using Oracle Primavera Cloud Data for Live Scheduling Insights and Progress Tracking
One example of this is Jared Williams, a Lead Senior Scheduler at Commodore Builders, who is using data analytics to do things like find minor recurring impacts on Construction Schedules. To do this, he’s created a new Metric that tracks activity-level changes and trending Changes in Toric and built an interactive, real-time scheduling dashboard to improve insight into project progress and compare scheduling against estimations by extracting data from Oracle Primavera Cloud. Learn more here.
Another example is how Amanda Finnerty, Director of Internal Operations, helped use Revit to get timely and accurate quantity take-off (QTO) for an intricate curved wall design to quickly validate steel tonnage and confirm that the estimates were on point. They implemented a process to pull data from Revit and then interact with it directly for analysis, and now they are prepared to handle complex designs for QTO at scale in the future. Learn more here.
As a final example, Amanda Finnerty, Director of Internal Operations, partnered with Safety executives on their Safety Incentive Program and added rich insights into the initiative. Commodore Builders is committed to safety and ensures that a Safe Plan of Action (SPA) is completed every morning and validated with a straightforward measure: how many crews are on site versus how many SPAs have been completed for the day. These KPIs made it easy for the superintendent or safety officer to determine which crews were not complying with the safety protocols, which helped the teams take necessary corrective actions. The company instilled and reinforced a positive approach with training, coaching, incentives, and feedback. Learn more here.
Today, data and analytics are reshaping business models by creating new revenue streams, reducing costs, and directly impacting the construction industry by improving estimations, optimizing scheduling impact, and improving safety.
Against this backdrop, more companies like Commodore Builders in the construction industry see the positive impact of data and analytics in their projects, especially when supported with the right processes, people skills, tools, and technology.
To learn more about how Commodore Builders leverages data and analytics, please sign up for this on-webinar: https://www.toric.com/construction-data-leader-series to get practical advice and insights from Amanda Finnerty, Director of Internal Operations, at Commodore Builders.
Also, if you’re local to Boston, please join Amanda Finnerty for a Boston Procore Community Group Meeting with Toric on Tuesday, June 27th, at the Best Western Plus Waltham/Boston to meet other construction professionals and hear presentations from industry data leaders on how to combine data sources from the likes of Procore and Oracle Primavera Cloud (OPC) to create a single source of truth for data analytics, visualizations, and insights. Drinks and light appetizers will be served. Open to all. You do not have to be a Procore customer to attend.
What's Next?
So, what next? How can you get started to achieve business results with Data and analytics and unlock better data-driven decisions? As a Project Manager, Architect, Engineer, Estimator, Construction Engineer, VDC professional, or Quality and Safety professional, you can now empower yourself and your team with impactful insights using Toric.
To get started now, create an account with Toric and immediately begin your data-driven journey. Import any CSV or Excel file easily and use them to build more impactful reports and dashboards that best serve your business. Our tutorial here will guide you through the process.
You can upgrade to implement Toric’s construction analytics and insights solution – for only $300/month and get additional features like pre-built Connectors to effortlessly integrate with major construction tools and Automations to drastically simplify your reporting routines. By configuring your connectors and automations in Toric just once, it can automate the tasks needed to enjoy up-to-date dashboards and reports without repetitive and tedious work.
