Construction projects involve multiple separate entities, from designers to generals to subs to vendors to owners, requiring extensive collaboration across organizational boundaries. Modern construction software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications may be able to facilitate data sharing across companies involved in a project, but the underlying data structures and formats are diverse--making it hard to come up with a single version of the truth for a building team to manage to.
That is the problem being addressed by Toric, a data analytics workspace capable of standardizing, cleaning and harmonizing data from different applications into a single version of the truth. We caught up with Toric Senior Product Manager Meena Abdelkodoos and got caught up with the latest enhancements to the platform.
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One use case for the technology may be the capture of estimate and preconstruction data to enable project teams to identify variances. But Abdelkodoos said there is a more compelling use case ...
IRONPROS: So if you were to walk into a group of preconstruction and project operations professionals--the ones managing projets and responsible for P&L, how do you tell them about how they can use that preconstruction data and estimate and use it during the work-in-progress (WIP) phase of the project?
ABDELKODOOS: Actually, I think that is important, but I think the reverse is more important. A lot of times the estimator has to generate a GMP, or guaranteed maximum price for the owner. Estimators kind of take their hands off the wheel tracking what's going on with the project. Change orders are moving quickly and it's very hard to track granularly to a line item degree what is happening with the estimate. But because you are handing over the estimate in this data format, project teams can pipe the information to themselves as they need to ingest it. To categorize this information the way the estimate reflects it, the estimators will have a more granular idea on the next project and how their estimates faired versus actual conditions and what changed it--things that were in the GC's control or things that were not in the GC's control."
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