Over the past 20 years, the need for solution integration strategies in construction has shifted from convenient to ideal to critical. However, the construction industry has not kept pace with technology to facilitate these integrations. Many companies continue to manually reenter data in multiple systems, often after manually manipulating the data in a spreadsheet or by performing a nightly batch upload using a CSV file that is produced in one system and consumed in another.

This article explores the changes in software applications used within the construction industry, the different types of integration approaches available, and the associated benefits and drawbacks of each. It will also discuss considerations when developing a strategy for your company as well as steps to help begin deployment. 

The Need for Better Integrations

Enterprise Resource Planning

While construction companies have utilized fully integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with many software applications or functions available, those rarely included estimating, time capture, and scheduling. Only recently have they included a competitive version of a project management system and have all but given up on a robust human resource (HR) application; service management is now often a third-party application as well. Think of ERP as a hub and every application that has a financial transaction associated with it as the spokes; the hub is getting crowded and those integrations need to be controlled.

Meanwhile, the industry is awash in new applications that handle tangential functions to ERP (e.g., scale ticketing, timecard processing, and HR), many of which did not anticipate integrating with ERP or any other solutions, leaving contracting companies with as many as 5-10 applications that act as data silos in the organization.

Complications in the Cloud

There has been a substantial shift to cloud-based applications, which outsource the infrastructure away from on-premise data centers and applications. Rather than having control of the applications and databases from within your IT department, control has shifted to the service providers, hosting companies, and software providers that are very selective about how they allow access to their applications and data (because all of their customers’ data is often in one database (i.e., multi-tenant)). This means that integration approaches that once worked well with programs and data in your building are no longer viable (or at a minimum are more challenging), though some of these vendors are providing openings to enter data or extract data out through APIs.

Complicating matters is the frequency with which software vendors provide new features or updates to their applications. Historically, this was an annual or semi-annual event and was not as disruptive as it can be today with frequent updates being pushed out by vendors, sometimes even monthly. These updates have the ability (or tendency) to break integrations that were written to connect one application to another.

So, after each new update, the integrations are checked in a “test” environment (a copy of the production environment of a given system that is used expressly for testing changes in processes, upgrades, and custom programming) before promoting the patch or upgrade to your production environment. This allows for thorough testing without interfering with the live production environment.

Using a cloud-based application rarely provides this luxury. Often, vendors shut the application down at night, install the upgrade, and the next morning you have new features. This makes maintaining custom applications more difficult.