Restructuring the Construction Industry with the Power of Embedded Analytics
All companies desire to stay one step ahead of their competitors and lead in their industry. Construction firms have a massive amount of data, but sorting and organizing the useful parts of that data into meaningful presentations for analysis is difficult. Harnessing the power of their data requires the right tools, and embedded analytics does the job perfectly.
With embedded analytics, you can identify trends and help contractors find and resolve problems before they impact projects. An embedded analytics platform helps you uncover patterns, trends, and relationships by processing your existing data and presenting it to you with easily digested visuals. In this blog post, I am going to give you a brief overview of embedded analytics and how it will help players in the construction industry.
What is embedded analytics?
Embedded analytics gives you the ability to integrate reports, dashboards, and data visualizations inside an application’s user interface to improve data comprehension and usability. Bold BI Embedded is an end-to-end solution with a powerful dashboard server application for creating, managing, and sharing interactive business dashboards. It will help you create more powerful data visualizations and manage them easily. You can also easily interact with the data widgets and extract meaningful insights in your own application.
Benefits of embedded analytics in the construction industry
Embedded analytics has major potential to benefit the construction industry through data visualization, which helps construction companies make productive business decisions. With embedded analytics, you can embed and visualize KPIs useful for managing construction projects, making large amounts of data accessible. Being able to interpret the trends in your data easily lets you take timely action toward achieving your business goals. Let’s look at the benefits of embedded analytics in the construction field.
Managing multiple projects
These days, many construction firms are managing to get projects easier but completing those projects within the deadline and budget is difficult. Embedded analytics dashboards help you manage and track multiple projects easily and monitor the progress and quality of them with important KPIs such as site inspections, defects, and rework costs.
Organizing the storage, maintenance, and transportation
Monitoring storage and project site maintenance, allocating human resources, and tracking materials transportation pose roadblocks to the construction industry. Embedded analytics dashboards monitor your storage facilities and let you effectively manage your stock and human resources as well as actively track the transportation process.
Increased costs and managing resources
The materials used for construction play a major role in the completion of a project. Embedded analytics help you forecast the quantity of materials you’ll need for future projects in real-time and restock them in an efficient way. This will help you to reduce the waiting time for materials and complete the project faster. Further, you can track the market price trends for construction materials and stock them in advance at advantagious prices. This will reduce the overall construction costs, especially for large contracts, and mitigate the risk of unanticipated cost increases.
Business ownership
Owning a business comes with responsibilities from bidding on a project, to managing it, to completing it as quickly as possible. Deploying embedded analytics in an organization helps the business owner spend less time switching among applications, trying to get a complete picture of their data. Their data is now all in one place. They can use it to predict the future outcome of their present course and take rapid action based on process analysis. Monitoring projects from start to end helps a company manage work efficiently, which increases profitability.
How to embed analytical tools into construction domain apps
I’ll now show you how analytics can be embedded into your construction web application. I am going to give you a walkthrough specifically on embedding dashboards in your 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 Embedded and avoid building an analytics or BI solution yourself, saving development time. Follow these steps to embed your dashboard successfully.
Prerequisites
Deploy Bold BI Embedded edition in your local machine and create an enterprise-grade dashboard.
Step 1: Create an ASP.NET Core application.
To successfully embed a dashboard into your application, first you need to create an ASP.NET Core application. So, you need to 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.
RootUrl: Dashboard server BI URL. For example: http://localhost:5000/bi, http://dashboard.syncfusion.com/bi.SiteIdentifier: For Bold BI Enterprise edition, it should be something like “site/site1”. For Bold BI Cloud edition, it should be an empty string.Environment: Bold BI application environment. For cloud BI, you can use “cloud.” For Enterprise BI, you should use “enterprise.”UserEmail: The Bold BI server will use an email to authorize the authorization server.
Step 3: Generate embed secret.
You have to set the embed secret for authentication. You can get the embed secret from the Bold BI server. Then, navigate to the Settings icon on the left navigation bar and click the Embed tab. Enable the Enable embed authentication option, and click the Generate Secret button. On clicking the button, a secret code will be generated. Paste the saved secret key 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 again 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 need for the user 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 required script files and CSS files to HTML pages.
Step 6: Run the application for embedding the dashboard.
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 into your web application.
To learn more on embedding dashboards into your applications, please refer to this blog. You can also download the sample code mentioned in all the previous steps from our documentation.
Bold BI’s construction solution dashboard examples
Construction Quality Management Dashboard
By embedding the Construction Quality Management dashboard in your application, your construction company can manage and monitor the quality of your projects, including metrics like rework costs, safety meetings conducted, site inspections, defect types, the average time to fix the defects, NCR reports, net promoter score, and customer satisfaction score.
Key metrics and KPIs
Customer satisfaction score: Measured based on the complaints issued by customers about contractors.
Net promoter score: The survey of a service, product, or company determining how likely its customers are to recommend it to others.
Site inspection — success level: Shows the results of site inspections.
Total rework cost: Shows the amount spent on fixing mistakes.
Construction Project Monitoring Dashboard
By embedding the Construction Project Monitoring dashboardin your application, managers can monitor the important KPIs relating to project stages, budget details, and resource allocation.
Key metrics and KPIs
Project work status: Shows one of three work statuses for each project: not started, in progress, or completed.
Project completion percentage: Shows the completion percentage of a project.
Budget variance: Shows the difference between the planned budget, or baseline amount of expense, and the actual amount spent.
Actual vs. planned resources by project: Shows the comparison between the planned resources and the actual resources involved in the projects.
Workload: Shows the workload of resources categorized into three types: completed, remaining, and overdue.
Conclusion
Bold BI Embedded helps you integrate dashboards in your applications written in ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET MVC, Angular, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, React with ASP.NET Core, React with Go, Winforms, and more, seamlessly. It will save you time and prevent you from doing redundant work. Click this link to explore its features. To learn more about embedding dashboards into your application, refer to this blog and our help documentation.
I hope you now have a better understanding of Bold BI Embedded and how it will help the construction industry be more successful. You can create any kind of dashboard you like with Bold BI Embedded’s 35 widgets and 130 data sources.
To get started with Bold BI, schedule a free 30-minute demo with our experts about any features you would like to learn more about. 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 August 20, 2021.
