Data Management Requires Planning

A company's data is among its most valuable assets. Here’s how to leverage it.

Every day you work with a diverse set of documents as you plan, sell, and build your projects, including a diverse range of documents throughout the lifecycle of any project. As part of any major development, construction firms create contracts, blueprints, renderings, photographs, and virtual walk-throughs. Business is more than just work, it’s about valuable data.

This data is about managing information, and the flow of much needed documents associated with all the data. The data includes accessing business-related documents such as payroll and employee benefits records, accounts payable, accounts receivable; prospect, client, supplier information; historical job costs and building materials catalogs and price lists.

Managing these documents requires storage, retrieval, updating, sorting, and more. Data from a host of sources must be extracted and combined with data from other sources, extracted and integrated cleanly. Authorized personnel must be able to make essential changes. Part of this effort includes moving data from one source to another in a clean, accurate, and seamless manner. While changes might be accepted from a variety of individuals, approval of those changes must be made with authorization. All the data must be securely archived to preserve the company’s history.

These tasks can certainly be performed manually, of course, as was once the norm even for the largest construction firms. Some firms still rely solely on certain manual processes, which might surprise the most advanced digital-native workers. Today, however, many firms now use automated procedures to manage their data.

With the advances in automation comes an even greater need for a database. A quick definition of a database is a collection of records each organized into specifically defined fields, combined with a set of operating procedures for data access, searching, sorting, and more. There are a variety of database management products available today, offering different functionalities and price points. These products can enable construction firms to manage thousands of records, perform ad hoc analyses, and create custom reports with ease, significantly improving business management. Tasks like payroll processing that once took hours can now be completed in minutes.

Historically, the most powerful databases were pricey. I might go as far as to say they carried a hefty pricetag and required experts—database administrators—to install, operate, and maintain them. Smaller firms often used spreadsheets and electronic address books for basic data management. Others looked to tools like Microsoft Access. Today most companies turn to relational database products to obtain even greater benefits.

There is no question that a database is at the center of most construction company’s essential most mission-critical business systems.

There are typically four key considerations when pondering database management software: ease of use, scalability, disaster recovery, and compatibility. As we have discussed previously, there are many options for database tools.

Consider this fact, many smaller subs and construction firms don't employ a full-time IT (information technology) professional to make key buying decisions. Therefore, database software needs to be straightforward to install, use, maintain, and upgrade. Find a tool that provides advice, database creation, backup scheduling, and data import/export.

As a company grows, you will need to scale up your databases and systems. For some, this can be costly and a time-consuming process of purchasing and installing new database software, learning to use it, and migrating existing databases.

Purchase a system that simplifies this with a single code base that runs on everything from basic Microsoft Windows to the largest clustered systems. It can even run on laptops, enabling mobile users to access company databases from the field.

A company's data is among its most valuable assets. Protecting this resource is essential. Some of the biggest concerns that need to be addressed include disk drive failure and inadvertent user error as well as loss of the physical server through fire or other natural disaster. Finding the right software database backup and restore, incremental backup and restore, and individual file backup and restore is vital. This then brings us to the discussion for where we are in today’s computing with traditional data centers, cloud, and edge, all for another time.