Built on Time: 4 Critical Project Performance Questions Rhumbix Answers

RhumbixSeptember 12, 2022 • 8 min read

Learn how Rhumbix delivers timely and actionable analytics that give you new project performance insights into critical project time and resources metrics.

At Rhumbix, we started with the most challenging part of performance tracking first—capturing and configuring time around labor, equipment, and materials that meet the unique needs of top commercial and industrial contractors. To deliver the most effective performance tracking tools, we created Rhumbix Field Analytix™ as part of our construction time and resource management solution to gain stronger visibility into time and resource performance.

Rhumbix Field Analytix™ creates a centralized view of project performance, delivering real-time visibility into field-level productivity. Real-time reporting and powerful data visualizations connect both your field and office teams with the critical insights needed to better track and manage project time and resources while driving stronger project performance.

With this centralized analytics tool, field and office teams can better understand key performance metrics over time and across projects, instantly detecting changes, exceptions, and risks. 

Rhumbix Field Analytix™ visualizes productivity indicators like cost code status, labor distribution, and budget versus actual in real-time, enabling your team to connect and share insights across the organization efficiently. Turn your field data into project insights that drive action using the industry’s most accessible yet most advanced analytics tool for better project performance.

The following questions represent four critical performance insights your team needs to better manage project time and resources for more robust performance and profitability.

Construction site

We’ve collected the TOP 4 QUESTIONS asked by customers before choosing Rhumbix Field Analytix™ to help them build faster, smarter, and better.  

Q:1 How can I avoid delays with analytics?

Project delays can happen for numerous reasons. A universal delay in recent memory in North America began in March 2020. Beyond world-altering events, it’s common knowledge that construction projects are fluid and often need alterations to agreed-upon deliverables, with project postponements and schedule slippage being typical results. One of the major factors can be scope creep, which happens when change requests are not completed on time or are not fulfilled. Shifts in the project scope go beyond adding extra materials and budget and can often affect the project schedule, resource allocation, and employee availability and may even compromise the completion of milestones and goals. 

In addition to changes to the project scope, construction firms often fight an internal battle, digging through paperwork and spreadsheets to glean information on the status of crews and their assignments. Figuring out the progress of specific cost codes and activities while understanding if materials have been delivered on time, misplaced, or broken can test the patience of the most seasoned professionals. Capturing critical project details becomes a nightmare without one source of time and resource tracking and management. Those who need to deliver a project are left without visibility into the project activities where the bottlenecks occur. 

Accelerate construction operations: Don’t be left in the dark regarding critical project time and resource metrics that can provide actionable analytic insights to avoid delays or mitigate performance risks. If you’re unsure which performance areas are causing the most significant delays, it’s due to a lack of visibility into project performance analytics. 

Proper field reporting and Rhumbix Field Analytix™ can help identify inefficiencies and significantly impact your operational workflows. Avoiding costly delays with real-time reporting enables you to gain field-level insights faster to make more informed decisions and increase project performance. 

Rhumbix helps contractors improve jobsite processes and productivity. Contractors improve workflows, automate tasks, find efficiencies, cut costs, and more by analyzing data collected on your jobsite. Accurate data analytics is more than just tracking traditional job costs and cash flow. Rhumbix Field Analytix™ dashboards enable contractors to visualize project performance. Increased visibility leads to increased project productivity. 

Q2: How am I performing against budget?

Construction teams spend countless hours and resources in planning and pre-construction to develop a plan that will deliver on a targeted timeline and financial budget. Client satisfaction and project profitability depend on performing as close to this plan as possible despite a complex and constantly evolving environment on the jobsite. So how is your team actually performing?

To understand this, your team needs to know the answer to a straightforward question: “What have we actually done on the project?” Unfortunately, this answer is complex, with performance data being spread across multiple crews over weeks, months, or even years on a project. The Rhumbix Time & Resource Management solution enables teams to easily capture labor, material, and equipment information at the field level and associate detailed time. This means that project performance down to the cost code level is centralized and automatically compared to both the overall project budget and specific cost code utilization targets.

Rhumbix brings field-level insights to contractors who can utilize pre-built reporting and analytic visualizations to drive more value from the reporting data and better understand essential production and labor utilization trends and potential safety or compliance issues. With Field Analytix™, your team has access to visualized reporting on cost code performance and production rates to see actual hours and installed quantities against the budget. Overruns on a specific cost code or installed quantities well behind schedule help reveal project-level issues and can be more easily detected early on to minimize the impact.

Using Rhumbix Field Analytix™ in the budget and purchasing process provides the data from material usage needed to assess the mix of materials to be purchased for the future. For example, an analysis of actual usage and downtime in previous projects can reveal which types of staff, material, and equipment to justify the future budgets.

Rhumbix can help beyond isolated project budgets; construction firms can use financial analytics to track and forecast company-wide revenue and profit to drive better decision-making on staffing, future projects to bid on, and strategic priorities. 

Q3: How can I reduce project risk using analytics? 

Improving the accuracy of reporting is a crucial task for reducing risk.

When projects run a manual process, it’s frequent that mistakes happen. While not all mistakes may significantly impact the construction operations and liability, it is often difficult to anticipate the extent to which incomplete reporting and errors put a company at risk for penalties, substantial wasted time, rework, and money. The best data collection and analytics software helps to remove human error in data collection–the field and office.

When jobsite reports, timesheets, delivery receipts, and other critical data are manually recorded, unstructured data and human error can create uncertainty in the reliability of your construction project info.  

Automating data collection using a field-first mobile app streamlines reporting processes and ensures that data is higher quality, more comprehensive, and more available. As a result, contractors can generate more actionable insights and avoid misinformed decisions with better data. 

Reducing risk and increasing safety 

All construction firms need to track and maintain data related to safety issues. For example, injuries, safety inspections, and other information must be recorded and, in some cases, submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. But going a step further and Rhumbix can help you identify high-risk tasks and dangerous conditions, helping prevent future incidents and reduce the risk for your business. For instance, specific cost codes or project locations may be associated with riskier conditions. Knowing that work is occurring in these areas can help to ensure proper visibility to critical project team members and departments.

Rhumbix also helps customers mitigate risks by quickly harvesting and analyzing data from construction projects across their portfolios to identify potential risks and problems. For example, by analyzing the productivity of crucial resources such as labor and equipment, Rhumbix can inform the project team of potential delay risks, possible fatigue, and overall project time and cost overruns. In addition, collecting “structured data” makes it possible to identify [good/bad] trends and risks that can expose the entire business.

Q4: How can I drive better project results with analytics?

It’s always challenging to manage what you can’t measure. Understanding production trends and key performance metrics empowers your team to make better decisions around time utilization and resource allocation. It is impossible to prevent overruns if your reporting data is 2 and 3 weeks behind actual field production. Without a continuous view to progress against budget, project teams are left to make gut decisions around labor, equipment, and material planning.

Gain instant visibility into key project performance metrics and take the gut feel and guesswork out of project performance with real-time field analytics. Get a complete view into the reporting activity from critical workflows like timekeeping to better understand what is going on across all crews and projects.

The possibilities for using Rhumbix Field Analytix™ for all construction projects are endless. From increased safety and efficiency on-site to better measurement and understanding of capital project outcomes, it’s now or never for the construction firms to embrace digital technologies and bring analytics and data-driven decision-making into every level of their work. 

Quality time & resource management has benefitted Rhumbix customers, who have stated eliminating 95% of reporting errors with our solution. The incentive and power of data analytics in construction are straightforward. Achieving meaningful project insights begins with real-time visibility into critical performance metrics surrounding time and resource utilization. Digitizing workflows is essential for your business to keep up with the competition.  

Utilizing Rhumbix’s Time & Resource Management solution on the jobsite enables you to automate data collection, eliminating human error and making essential information available to key personnel (executives, PMs, accounting, and the field) at pivotal times. In addition, these digital workflows ensure communication isn’t lost between the back of the file cabinet and the car seats and ensure you have the best information available for analysis and decision making.

Transitioning to time and resource tracking is mission-critical for more than the data analysis it enables; it’s key to your business growth and profitability. Rhumbix Field Analytix™ can save you money, headaches, and most of all, time in the future.