Unified platform blends construction applications and data to help owners and contractors continuously improve performance
Engineering and construction organizations struggle to unlock data across applications to effectively diagnose problems, predict risks, and inform future actions. To address this challenge, Oracle announced Oracle Construction Intelligence Cloud Analytics. The new solution combines data from Oracle Smart Construction Platform applications to give owners and contractors a comprehensive understanding of performance throughout their operations. With this insight, organizations can quickly spot and correct issues and target ways to drive continuous improvement across project planning, construction, and asset operation.
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” said Roz Buick, senior vice president of product, strategy, and marketing for Oracle Construction and Engineering. “The new Oracle Construction Intelligence Cloud Analytics offering combined with the Smart Construction Platform’s predictive intelligence engine and common data environment, gives our customers a deeper, holistic understanding of their performance. Now they can build unique data strategies that drive competitive differentiation. This is how the construction industry will get to six sigma precision like its industrial and manufacturing counterparts.”
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The Smart Construction Platform unites capabilities from Oracle engineering and construction applications and third-party solutions with a common data environment and user experience. With the platform, owners and contractors can more easily work together to improve decision-making at every level of their organizations. The new analytics solution and other platform enhancements were unveiled today at the Oracle Industry Lab in Deerfield, Illinois.
“We are increasingly focused on finding new and better ways to leverage our data to gain further insights into project performance and risk,” said Brian Neal, project manager, Rudolph Libbe Inc. “Connecting and blending data for analysis will provide the broadest and deepest view into our operations, helping us to understand trends across our business and identify ways to keep improving how we deliver projects for our customers.”
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Smart Construction Platform: Unifying people, processes, and data
The Smart Construction Platform brings together the core applications, processes, and data that owners and contractors need to work together across project and asset lifecycles. These include portfolio planning, bid/tender processes, contracts, schedules, project documents and building information model (BIM) collaboration, field tasks, costs, and payments. With the new unified experience, common data environment, and cross-application interoperability, users can easily move between applications and data sets while working within a single project. By synchronizing activities, resources, and data as each project and asset progresses, the platform helps ensure teams across disciplines are always working toward the same goal, with the same information.
For instance, the platform’s scheduling and project management capabilities synchronize planning and worksite teams around a master plan, giving both visibility into a unified schedule and the task data needed to do the right work in the right place at the right time. So, if an HVAC installation should change because of a supply chain issue, the project manager will automatically receive the updated schedule information and can coordinate any needed adjustments across all impacted teams.
Likewise, the platform gives capital planners accurate, timely data on project forecasts so they can align with managers on budget requirements and adjust as strategic priorities change. For example, inflation doubles the costs of a required set of materials on a project. The project manager can push those new actuals and forecast up to the planner who can perform just-in-time changes to the portfolio, possibly pulling funds from a less important project, or putting a project on hold.
And as the platform continually learns and gets smarter using machine learning technologies, it will take these past actions into consideration to flag potential risks and guide more informed decision making in the future. These are just a few of the many connected experiences the platform can deliver by:
- Providing up-to-date schedule data to project managers so they can keep teams aligned to planned delivery dates and other schedule requirements
- Uniting planning (CPM schedule) with worksite teams (task schedule) to minimize wasted time and resources
- Letting capital planning and project execution teams exchange budget and actual cost data, enabling both teams to confidently adjust as work progresses
- Automatically storing completed bid/tender packages as well as approved invoices and other payment materials in organizations’ document registers
- Giving all stakeholders visibility to collectively track progress, identify and mitigate risks, and efficiently manage change across the entire supply chain
“Oracle has helped us improve coordination, visibility, and control during project development,” said Weronika Nowak, document control and IT manager for Mayflower Wind. “The ability to further connect our teams, processes, and data across applications and all project phases will increase efficiency while providing our people with the information needed to readily manage change as we work to deliver critical energy assets.”
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