Guest post: Vikas Handa, CTO & Co-founder at OnIndus
The construction industry is responsible for nearly $1.3 trillion dollars of structures each year, building and maintaining our roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, businesses, and residential communities.
As technology is relatively new to this sector, the adoption of technology has made its way in with disparate systems that track the progress of different programs, funding, bids, scheduling, external contractors, accounting – and the list goes on.
A single construction program can rely on more than eight different systems to gain a true understanding of how the program is progressing and where exactly risks lie. To access data from these eight different systems, the use of Excel spreadsheets is common as well as good old manual data entry. With no way of managing the quality of the data, or how timely it is, the program is often vulnerable to risk that can cost the owner tens of millions of dollars.
We call this data wrangling.
To wrangle all this data requires technology and a skillset often not found in owner organizations, however, OnIndus with SnapLogic under the hood, has developed a proprietary system to support this massive pothole.
Integration Enables Real-time Insights
Data should tell a story based on relevant background and real-time facts and then deliver the “what’s next” answer everyone needs to make sound decisions. The OnIndus Business Intelligence Framework delivers real-time analytic dashboards and trends that guide leadership to insights and analysis to the health of any capital improvement program.
Recently, a transit line with 16 million riders a week was awarded an estimated $2.1B project. In order to manage and track costs for such a visible project, the agency needed to automate and integrate data from disparate systems to ensure confidence with the local tax paying community and other key stakeholders. OnIndus experts collaborated with the team and were able to deliver a customized analytics solution that offered the insight required to understand and communicate where exactly risks lie, how the funds were being spent, and estimated time to delivery. Using SnapLogic, we quickly connected Construction Projects, Budget Management, Contracts and Invoice applications with our analytics solution to enable our customers to obtain holistic insights. This was done within weeks of project kick-off, delivering an immediate ROI to the project team and giving time back to the administrative staff who no longer needed to manually reconcile and enter data.
In our Business Intelligence Framework, we use SnapLogic to wrangle data from disparate data sources, including project management information systems (PMIS), ERP systems, geographic information systems (GIS), asset management, file systems, and other enterprise applications. This data is stored into Amazon S3 where the data can be used in analytics and reporting (using visualization tools like Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, or Google BI) or further enriched using our AI engine. We provide reports and dashboards along with trend analysis for our customers so they can uncover areas of opportunity to take action quickly and remove any roadblocks.
OnIndus Enterprise System Analytics requires no additional hardware or software and delivers secure enterprise cloud infrastructure with rapid deployment realizing immediate ROI. The transit is now able to deliver reliable data, updates, and reports to the taxpayers as well as key stakeholders on the state of the ongoing maintenance and new projects moving the community safely from one location to another. As the integration layer in our Enterprise System Analytics offering, SnapLogic has helped expedite system integrations and put real-time data insights into our customer’s hands.
Sign up for SnapLogic’s free trial and start wrangling data.
