Leveraging data to enhance project transparency and safety

The Challenge

Harkins Builders’ mission—to produce quality work the first time—uses a rigorous, disciplined system of best practices focused on transparency to achieve success: a project built on time, within a safe environment, on budget, with everyone that has touched the project believing their life has been enriched as a result of the experience. To deliver that level of transparency, Harkins needed to fully leverage their available project data in order to anticipate and address challenges, promote safety and quality, and measure progress against plans.

The Solution

Procore’s cloud-based platform captures and organizes data from across all your projects. Then applies that data within its tools to help improve project and process outcomes. While offering up analytics and BI capabilities required to make the most impactful, data driven decisions possible. Procore’s platform serves as a single source of truth whose efficiencies only grow larger and more pronounced at scale.

The Results

• Consolidated project information enabled Harkins to maximize data usage across their entire portfolio of projects
• Customizable reports and dashboards in Procore Analytics helped the Harkins team identify and address hidden project risks
• Generating insights through the Procore Platform fostered transparency and accountability, informing new strategies for vendor engagement

Establish consistent systems

Patrick Hennessy is the Director of Scheduling & Analytics for Harkins Builders. And since 2015, he’s been guiding construction companies towards more effective, scalable data practices. "Think about where the sports world has come from 20 years ago, or the world of digital advertising today." Says Hennessy. "Data is meticulously captured and tracked, then leveraged to drive innovation. We are striving to do the same thing within the construction industry by capturing and tracking all our data, then applying analytics and artificial intelligence to create predictive and prescriptive insights to help us determine where we can mitigate risk on our projects. In order to take advantage however, you need to have a plan. A strategy that encompasses the data points you want to capture, the tools you’ll choose to use, and the process for internal adoption." Harkins works with clients in the Mid-Atlantic Eastern US, from New Jersey to the Carolinas. With project teams so dispersed, there is added pressure to adopt systems and tools that can help drive standardization across a diverse set of geographies, project types and available vendors. "We realized we had all this project data going into Procore but we weren’t fully utilizing all of it. We had data silos, with limited information being shared across our teams. Teams were recording data and performing procedures differently within Procore. We recognized that to affect the change we wanted, it would take time. So we developed a roadmap of items to address. Things like: How are we going to get our data? What was our database going to look like? What tools are we going to use to leverage that data? Where is our low hanging fruit?" 

Identify Risks Early

Safety data was the first area of low hanging fruit that Harkins Builders Identified. The team leveraged data from Procore’s Quality & Safety, analyzing it within Procore Analytics to flag indicators of high injury risk. These insights had an immediate impact and Patrick’s team used this as an early win to encourage more adoption of data best practices. But these first steps helped identify a whole slew of risks to their overall strategy.

"You need your data to be accurate and standardized to get the portfolio level insights you’re looking for and user buy-in takes time. Having a platform like Procore to organize everything, with analytics tools to help generate the insights we need was key to making it all possible."

"We are still very early on in our journey, only really at the beginning of generating actionable insights for the company. That said, we’ve been able to identify a collection of problems we’ve begun to address."

Harkins Early Use Cases

• Flagging data input inconsistencies

• Identifying unsafe trade partners

• Defining most common safety inspection concerns

• Slowest responding trade partners or architects

• Most utilized trade partners

• Project team accountability

Hold teams accountable

"When we’re able to collect this data accurately and in a standardized format organized in Procore, we are then able to use it to set and maintain standards for our project teams. This allows us to hold teams accountable to doing things the right way." Says Hennessy. "We are able to create a level of transparency around performance that makes it so much easier to drive results. By being transparent with all this data, we’re also empowering and emboldening our people to take greater responsibility for their results."

Actionable Results

By utilizing the Procore Platform, especially elements like Procore Analytics, Harkins was able to make some specific, targeted adjustments to how they were operating that had a meaningful impact on their performance. "Our analysis using Procore Analytics is informing the usage of potential contract language with trade partners based on the metrics we’re seeing. One example is about safety violations per man hours worked on a job site. We are able to use our data to mandate our partners meet certain thresholds or maintain a safety professional on site if they want to work our jobs." "We are also able to direct specialized training both internally with our people and externally with our partners based on where the data tells us we have our biggest training gaps, to ensure the best quality and safety standards across the board."