Construction Progress Tracking: Pain Points & Reconstruct’s Solution

Reconstruct offers a web-based solution that visually tracks progress on construction sites and provides proactive and actionable analytics that enable project teams to understand and analyze project performance and risk, and tap off potential delays before they surface. Visit www.reconstructinc.com to learn more or start a free trial. Image courtesy of ICARUSAerials.

U.S. Construction spending has hit its highest level in 11 years, with a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $1.23 Trillion [1]. Many economists expect U.S. construction to grow further in 2017, reflecting a strong job market with the lowest unemployment rate in 11 years [2].

While spending is on a steady rise, schedule delays and cost overruns are also common news stories in the U.S. and around the world. The latest surveys from Dodge Data & Analytics [3] and McKinsey & Company [4] show more than half of projects finish late and are over budget.

Variance of estimated schedule and cost at start vs. completion of construction projects: Most typical projects complete behind schedule and are over budget. Even when best practices such as Lean Construction principles are adopted, some projects complete behind schedule and are still over budget. Figure is reproduced based on quantitative data from Dodge Data & Analytics’s 2016 report & 2016 national webinar of Bevan Mace from Balfour Beatty and Steve Jones from Dodge Data & Analytics to Lean Construction Institute, entitled “How satisfied, really satisfied, are Owners?” .

Pain Points in Progress Tracking

A variety of factors account for schedule and cost outcomes. As reported by McKinsey&Company and others [2,5–6], the following factors are related to how progress tracking is practiced on project sites:

1. Inconsistent progress reporting, inadequate communication, and infrequent performance management

Tracking progress on construction sites is largely an inconsistent practice. Paper-based reports can be replaced by a suite of mobile apps, but assessments are still time-consuming and rely on the experience of the individuals who are reporting them. As a result, daily field reports do not often communicate any actionable information. For example, a drywall subcontractor might document “framing” without communicating the work location or the quantity of studs placed. Thus, subcontractors, contractors, and owners do not have a consistent understanding of how much progress is achieved on their sites on a daily basis.

Because these reports are not easily and quickly verifiable, project teams wait for an entire week or even more to participate in a coordination meeting where teams are asked again to report their progress by color-coding 2D drawings or 2D projections of their BIM (mostly using SmartBoard overlays as opposed to reporting directly within the BIM environment).

Due to inadequate communications and lack of accountability, issues easily stack up and result in deficient performance management. Hence, from the time a problem happens to the time it is reported, project management loses five to ten workdays to devise corrective control strategies, and the project team ends up reacting to actual delays as opposed to proactively addressing them.

Inconsistent progress reporting, inadequate communication, and infrequent performance management are all too common on construction sites.

2. Poor short-term planning and missed connection to actual progress

Project teams are generally very good at long-term planning and understanding what can be done in two to three months, but there is much room for improvement in short-term planning and understanding how much work will actually get done in a week or two. A close examination of root-causes shows that more than 80% of performance variations are related to changes in work plan, poor communication of resource availablity (work locations, materials, & labor), incompletion of handoffs among subcontractors, and underestimating effort required to complete a task (which needs knowledge of productivity rates from the site).

Reliable look-ahead and weekly work planning require timely and verifiable feedback on actual performance, which is largely missing in today’s practices.

The individuals involved in project planning are also not on the site on a regular basis, and timely and verifiable feedback is not provided to them to update plans when necessary. Planning tools — particularly those used for weekly work planning and look-ahead scheduling — also do not offer any flexibility to the project teams to easily and quickly make changes to their plans while they are on the site. As a result, these changes are not recorded and communicated with other project teams in real-time.

3. Insufficient management of project risk

Earned Value Analysis metrics such as Schedule Performance Index (SPI) and Cost Performance Index (CPI), or Percent Plan Complete (PPC) are all retroactive and only enable learning from the past performance. There is benefit in learning what works and what does not based on past performance data, yet current metrics do not offer any insight about risk for potential problems and the reliability of a project’s look-ahead schedule. Project teams are not equipped with actionable analytics that allows them to proactively tap off potential delays before they surface on their project sites.

To maximize overall productivity, engage subcontractors in coordination efforts, and tap off delays around work locations, new metrics and methods of communication are needed.

Any feedback on actual or potential delays should also encourage project teams to work collaboratively in coordination meetings to address them. Otherwise, it may end up promoting gains to be maximized for one subcontractor at the expense of the others, or it will simply disengage several teams from discussions on how the overall project performance can be improved.

Successful management of weekly work plans requires metrics that measure reliability of the look-ahead schedule and such metrics in turn require timely and verifiable feedback from the site on the actual performance of schedule tasks.

In today’s modus operandi, some projects do manage to succeed by putting more hours into their workflows; nevertheless, problems in progress tracking practices are critical, systemic, and all too common [2,5–6].

Visual Production Tracking: A Simple, Yet Effective Solution to Tracing Progress on Construction Sites

To address these pain points, Reconstruct offers a web-based solution that visually tracks progress and provides predictive data analytics that enable project teams to understand, analyze, and tap off potential delays on their sites. Our visual production management system builds on Production-level 4D BIM, Reality Capture and Modeling, and Predictive Data Analytics.

By taking advantage of 4D BIM, Reality Modeling, and Predictive Data Analytics, Reconstruct’s Platform enables location-driven project planning and constraint analysis on a weekly basis; communicates trade locations every day; tracks Percent Plan Complete (PPC) and manpower per task everyday; predicts risk in the look-ahead schedules; and enables actionable root-cause assessment and proactive project controls to tap off delays before they surface on project sites.

To offer real-time visual feedback to the project plan, Reconstruct VizMAP takes advantage of images and videos taken with drones and consumer-grade cameras to continuously reconstruct Reality of a project site in 3D and over a project’s timeline. Reconstruct is also uniquely positioned to support indoor operations. Reconstruct Field, an iPhone app, helps project teams use simple 2D interfaces to manage their photos, videos, and 360 in indoor environments.

Reconstruct’s platform takes advantage of existing images taken with drones and consumer-grade cameras to continuously reconstruct Reality of a project site in 3D and over a project’s timeline. Relevant site images can be accessed by clicking on a 3D point in the Reality models. Users can deep zoom on any image and directly conduct 3D measurements or annotations and share them with their project teams, directly from their web browsers.

Reconstruct Coordinate extends the application of 4D BIM beyond constructibility reviews and clash detection, and maps 4D BIM to Reality data for tracking and managing progress. 4D BIM can be organized by work locations and related trades, making it easier to maintain an up-to-date 4D visual plan on construction sites. Since Reality models are directly modeled within 4D BIM, planned work, trade locations (who does what work in what location), safety, and quality issues can all be documented and communicated with the project team in real-time. By doing so, Reconstruct Coordinate enables consistent progress reporting and supports communication of performance data with project teams, in real-time, on and off the site.

Daily drone captures help project site performance to be documented at a high-frequency. The resulting high frequency 4D Reality models — produced by Reconstruct’s cloud-based engine — together with 4D BM provide project planners with a visual connection to the actual progress in a web environment, and empower them to monitor, revise, and communicate weekly work plans, as necessary.

BIM is integrated with project schedule (e.g. P6 or Microsoft Project) in the Reconstruct Coordinate web-based platform. The 4D BIM is visualized together with 4D Reality point cloud models, allowing for images, point clouds, and schedule data to be all visually organized, communicated, and shared around work breakdown structure locations.

Reconstruct Analytics builds on Reconstruct Coordinate with the addition of predictive data analytics. Integrated 4D Reality and 4D BIM enable construction progress and productivity to be monitored and communicated with the project team. Using predictive data analytics and based on various performance data from the project site, risk for potential delays — as it relates to the project look-ahead schedule — is also analyzed and communicated around work locations.

Within Reconstruct Analytics reports, information about actual and potential delays is organized and communicated around work locations. Project teams can use these reports together with Reconstruct Coordinate in their meetings to facilitate root-cause assessment on plan performance, document task constraints, proactively review plan alternatives in a collaborative fashion, get buy-in from the trades on their revised 4D visual plans, and maximize each trade’s and the overall project productivity.

Project teams use Reconstruct Coordinate together with Reconstruct Analytics reports in their coordination meetings to collaboratively revise work plans and proactively tap off delays.

By mapping Reality to Plan and putting schedule tasks and project performance data in a visual context for the entire team, Reconstruct VizMAP, Coordinate, and Analytics address today’s pain points in progress tracking, provide transparency in project execution, and empower project teams to better plan, coordinate, and communicate, and keep their projects on schedule and on budget.

Get Started with Reconstruct

Want to learn how Reconstruct can help your project? Please visit www.reconstructinc.com to start your free trial or request a consultation with one of our team members.

References

[1] The U.S. Census Bureau (2017) “Construction Spending”

[2] Crustinger, M. (2017) “construction spending hits highest level in 10 years”, Associate Press.

[3] Beven, M. and Jones, S. (2016) “How satisfied, really satisfied, are Owners?”, National webinar from Balfour Beatty and Dodge Data & Analytics to the Lean Construction Institute, April 26, 2016.

[4] Changali, S., Mohammad, A., and van Nieuwland, M. (2015). “The construction productivity imperative”, McKinsey & Company.

[5] Sacks, R., Barak, R., Belaciano, B., Gurevich, U. and Pikas, E. (2013) “KanBIM Workflow Management System: Prototype implementation and field testing”. Journal of Lean Construction, pp. 19–35

[6] Yang, J., Park, M.W., Vela, P., and Golparvar-Fard, M. (2015) “Construction performance monitoring via still images, time-lapse photos, and video streams: Now, tomorrow, and the future”, Journal of Advanced Engineering Informatics, 29 (2), pp. 211–224, ISSN 1474–0346.