Bird.i Case Study

Construction Intelligence

Construction intelligence firms such as Thomson Reuters Project, BNC, MEED or Construction IC, to name only few, track construction projects in details across cities, large regions or continents. They provide information at different level of granularity, including the locations, the type of project, the contractors, the financial value and obviously the current status of the project.

Image source Thomson Reuters Project Brochure

Decision-makers from investment banks, hedge funds or construction industry pay a premium to access the intelligence platforms operated by these firms for:

• Gaining direct access to the project related main point of contact
• Generating new leads to develop their business
• Analysing and forecasting construction markets
• Increasing their return on investment by analysing planned developments to understand where best to allocate resources
• Tracking and sharing project and company interactions across their organisation
• Gaining visibility of the entire project’s value chain and understanding the relationships between participants

These benefits are frequently promoted by the construction intelligence firms and they are well recognised by the sector. However, the key differentiator for these firms is the level of confidence and the freshness of the insights they are able to sell.

To update their construction project portfolio, most of the construction intelligence firms follow the same operational model: they have large team of analysts, which are responsible of updating a number of construction projects on a regular basis.

To do so, they leverage three different channels of information:

1. They use online resources, such as Google Maps, to find relevant information, which are often out of date and poor quality
2. They cold-call contractors to try to get information which reveals to be inaccurate or obsolete.
3. In last resort, they use Relationship Managers, which are resources on the ground, who travel directly to the construction site to report the current situation.

Current operational model to update construction projects portfolio

Obviously these operational models are time consuming, resulting in high costs and very limited opportunity to scale.

The direct consequences for their customers are:

• Overall project portfolio limited in size and coverage, requiring subscription to many different construction intelligence platforms
• The status of a construction project is updated on an average every 6 to 9 months
• The information provided need to be verified by other sources

Bird.i is a “Data as a Service” company which sources its images from the best satellite and airborne operators, to provide only up-to-date and accurate data tailored to every user’s needs via very simple API subscription services.

Screenshot of Thomson Reuters Project client showing latest satellite image over a construction site.

When construction intelligence firms integrates Bird.i’s Image Service into their web portal, their customers can view images over the construction sites which are just few days old and no older than 3 months. Bird.i’s Image Service improves end-users’ experience by offering up-to-date and evidence based information.

Although it provides obvious benefits to construction intelligence platforms users, it triggers as well more questions from the project analysts, which are looking at the progress, or lack of, for each of the construction site.

Because Bird.i’s culture is driven by its customers’ challenges, it was understood very quickly that the Image Service would be only a nice to have feature; but the core value of the imagery would be in the intelligence which can be extracted from it.

Two Intelligence Services resulted from this finding:

Location of active construction projects detected in the Middle East

Intelligence Service - Construction Progress Tracker which reduces operations costs by automating the tracking of progress, or lack of, over a complete construction project portfolio which can range from few dozens construction projects to millions of construction projects.

Intelligence Service — New Construction Tracker which increases revenues by detecting automatically new construction sites on a local, regional or national basis by growing the number of projects offered to end-users.

Construction intelligence firms which have integrated Bird.i’s Image and Intelligence Services, have shifted their operational mode from a time consuming manual process based on lengthy and expensive research toward a fully automated operational mode based on real time alert and targeted investigation.

New operational model to update construction projects portfolio

The three main benefits could be summarised:

• Image Service: It enhances the user experience, increase conversion leads and offer a competitive advantage by disseminating up-to-date and trustable information based on evidence.
• Intelligence Service - Construction Progress Tracker: It reduces up to 40% on average the time spent on each construction project by detecting automatically the changes over a period of time, which can be extracted on a regular basis in the form of a report to target investigations.
• Intelligence Service - New Construction Tracker: It detects regularly new construction projects in known areas of interest and scale up in new territories. This tracker results in revenues increase due to the ever expanding construction project portfolio.

You can hear it hereafter from Bird.i Founder Corentin Guillo, interviewed by Thomson Reuters, one of the early adopter of Bird.i’s services:

Corentin Guillo interviewed by Thomson Reuters on the advantages of using Bird i technology for the construction industry.