Enhance the Quality of Construction Projects with Embedded Analytics
Introduction
Satisfaction is the desire of every customer. Therefore, every construction company aims to secure its customer’s contentment by doing quality work. This gives rise to stiff competition in the construction industry. To gain a edge, construction firms can use embedded analytics to monitor all their data in one place, providing them insight into areas where they can improve the quality of their work. In this blog, I am going to provide a walkthrough of how embedded analytics helps construction managers attain their construction objectives by exploring the following topics:
- What is embedded analytics?
- Benefits of an embedded construction quality management dashboard.
- Bold BI Construction Quality Management Dashboard example.
- How to embed the Bold BI Construction Quality Management Dashboard into your application.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics is the integration of analytical solutions and data visualization capabilities into a software application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI helps you easily embed an analytics solution into your everyday work applications using a JavaScript SDK and server application. It also enables you to reduce dependency on IT teams and delivers all the insights you need to improve organizational and workforce outcomes.
Benefits of an embedded construction quality management dashboard
A construction quality management dashboard helps you monitor comprehensive key metrics and KPIs. Using this dashboard enables you to be flexible, build out customer service, and recognize customer value. Here are some of the key benefits:
- Effective work planning.
- Defect management.
- Improved development and growth.
- Safety planning.
Effective work planning
An embedded analytical dashboard for construction helps monitor metrics such as the list of projects, project type, project start date, and project finish date. This information helps company managers plan effectively by anticipating each project’s work plan, enabling the company to ensure projects are completed on time, to keep tabs on engineers’ performance, and to use company resources efficiently. This leads to higher quality work and higher productivity across projects.
Enhanced defect management
Other metrics that can be tracked with embedded analytics include site inspection status, major and minor defects, time taken to fix defects, and more. Tracking these assists project leaders in estimating rework costs, determining where and what type of defects are occurring, and fixing defects with proper solutions. Completing projects without any defects will improve customer satisfaction as well as the brand’s image, which will in turn attract more projects.
Improved development and growth
Embedded analytics helps key decision-makers monitor ongoing projects’ overall activities. With regular insight, leaders can devise strategies to improve project development and channel resources to the least productive areas of the company. These actions will guide the company to gradual growth, and will help the company build a good rapport between itself and its customers. In turn, this helps the company earn higher customer loyalty and satisfaction ratings, and increases the company’s profits.
Safety planning
With embedded analytics, project leads can track safety metrics such as the total number of safety meetings held and the total number of injuries in the field. This enables project leads to determine how well the company’s current safety plan is working and identify areas that need improvement. By consistently monitoring and refining safety procedures, the company can improve the safety of its employees, safeguarding their health, and thereby motivating them to do their best work. This, in turn, results in higher quality construction, which itself boosts customer satisfaction.
Bold BI’s Construction Quality Management Dashboard
Embedding the Construction Quality Management Dashboard helps a construction company analyze project planning, customer satisfaction, time management, progress toward goals, and more.
Let’s discuss each key metric and KPI in detail:
- Customer complaints.
- Promoters.
- Passives.
- Detractors.
- Site inspection success level.
- Total rework cost.
- Defect count.
- Safety meetings.
- Average time taken to fix defects.
- Customer satisfaction ratio.
- Customer satisfaction score.
- Net promoter score.
- Defect count by type and project type.
- Nonconformance reports by project.
Customer complaints
This set of data compares the total number of complaints and the number of resolved complaints.
Promoters
Promoters are customers most likely to recommend the company to others, rating it as a 9 or 10 on a scale from 0 to 10. The promoters data set shows the percentage of promoters based on the responses of customers.
Passives
Passives are customers likely to recommend the company to colleagues or others. They rate the company a 7 or 8 on a scale of 0 to 10.
Detractors
Detractors are customers not likely to recommend the company to colleagues or others, rating it somewhere between 0 and 6 on a scale from 0 to 10.
Site inspection success level
This card displays the total number of site inspections, the number of sites that passed inspection, and the percentge passed calculated from those numbers.
Total rework cost
This represents the total amount spent on rework.
Minor and major defects
This set of data displays the total numbers of minor and major defects.
Safety meetings
The safety meetings number card represents the number of safety meetings conducted across all projects.
Average time taken to fix defects
This dataset represents the average time taken to fix defects in construction projects.
Customer satisfaction ratio
This dataset showcases the customer satisfaction ratio of all the company’s projects. The ratio is calculated by dividing the ratings of resolved complaints by the total complaints.
Customer satisfaction score
This radial gauge showcases how satisfied customers are with the completion of their projects. It is calculated by dividing the total number of satisfied responses by the total number of responses and multiplying the result by 100.
Net promoter score
The net promoter score represents how likely customers are to recommend the company’s services to colleagues or others.
Defect count by type and project type
This data represents the defect count based on defect types (construction, design, workmanship) for each project category.
Nonconformance reports by project
This metric represents the number of closed and open nonconformance reports for each project.
For more information about the key metrics and KPIs in this dashboard demo, refer to the Construction Quality Management Dashboard example.
How to embed the Bold BI Construction Quality Management Dashboard into your application
I’ll now show you how the analytics we’ve discussed can be embedded into your construction web application. I will give you a walkthrough specifically on embedding dashboards in ASP.NET Core applications.
Suppose your construction company has a website like the one shown in the following image.
You can embed dashboards easily using Bold BI and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself, saving significant development time. Follow these steps to embed a dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Deploy Bold BI in your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET Core application.
To embed a dashboard into your application, first you need to create an ASP.NET Core application. So, open Microsoft Visual Studio and create a New Project. Then, choose ASP.NET Core Web Application, enter the project name, and click OK.
Step 2: Configure embed properties.
After the ASP.NET Core web application is created, you need to create a Model class called EmbedProperties under Models and provide the dashboard RootURL, SiteIdentifier, Environment, UserEmail, and EmbedSecret. These properties are explained in the following table.
RootUrl : Bold BI dashboard server URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi, http://dashboard.syncfusion.com/bi.SiteIdentifier : For Bold BI, it should be something like site/site1. For the Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, it should be an empty string.Environment : Your Bold BI application environment. If using Bold BI Cloud Analytics Server, you should use cloud. If using Bold BI, you should use enterprise.UserEmail : The Bold BI server will use an email address to authorize the authorization server.
Step 3: Generate embed secret.
You have to set the embed secret for authentication, and you get it from the Bold BI server. Click the Settings icon on the left navigation bar and click the Embed tab. Turn on the Enable embed authentication option and click the Generate Secret button. On clicking the button, a secret code will be generated. Copy the secret key and paste it into the application. To learn how to do this in detail, you can refer to this documentation link.
Note: Save the secret key, as it cannot be retrieved again. If it is not saved, you will have to regenerate it using the Reset Secret option.
Step 4: Create authorization server.
You need to implement an authorization server in the ASP.NET Core application to get authenticated before embedding the dashboard from the Bold BI server. You can also configure a single sign-on (SSO)-based authorization server, which is an authentication endpoint that enables users to securely authenticate multiple applications using a unique embed secret. This prevents the the user from having to log into different applications separately.
Step 5: Create Bold BI instance.
Finally, create a Bold BI instance to load the dashboard using a JavaScript file. Also, reference the required script files and CSS files in the necessary HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application that will have the dashboard embedded.
After successfully creating the ASP.NET Core application, you need to run the ASP.NET Core application. It will be launched with the dashboard details. Finally, you can see the dashboard from the Bold BI server is embedded in your web application.
We have successfully embedded the Construction Quality Management Dashboard in an ASP.NET Core web application. To learn more on embedding dashboards in your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code for all the previous steps from our documentation.
Conclusion
Bold BI helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails. It will help you save time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards in your application, refer to this blog and our documentation.
I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI and how it can help construction companies perform smarter. You can create a dashboard any way you like with Bold BI’s 35+ widgets and 130+ data sources.
Get started with Bold BI by signing up for a free 15-day trial and creating interactive business intelligence dashboards. You can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website or, if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your support question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on February 17, 2022.
