How Kahua Analytics are Revolutionizing Construction Data Management
Before we launched Kahua Analytics, our analytics efforts were crucial steppingstones for our customers utilizing us for construction project management. We offered a suite of products focused on reporting standards and dashboards, including paginated and static reporting, as well as at-a-glance dashboards with simple KPIs.
These tools were great from an aesthetic standpoint and allowed users to configure their views to meet their specific needs. Querying our customers on the next level of reporting opened the door to us developing a predictive analytics set of tools and dashboards to deliver on industry demands.
Even before we created the new functionality of Kahua Analytics, we offered the best in the construction project management information system (PMIS) workspace. Many in our industry rely heavily on paginated reporting for niche needs, one-off metrics and assessment, and other crucial, yet siloed, functions. This formed the bedrock of our offerings and was highly successful.
Continue to Innovate
But naturally – with Kahua being the highly innovative company that it is – we saw the potential for growth into dynamic analytics, where data coming from a single source of truth could be filtered, manipulated and transformed into KPIs by the end users themselves. This would allow our audience, irrespective of their organizational role, hierarchy position or internal biases to start from a common data point and then branch out based on their specific filters and configurations, slicing and dicing the data to get precise answers.
For years, there’s been an internal push towards analytics at Kahua. We started by applying analytics to our own operations: Tracking customer health, organizational performance, project progress and overall financial and operational company performance.
My initial role at Kahua was to enhance these internal analytics. We scrutinized customer health, project statuses and company performance metrics. With this deep understanding of our data, we decided to pilot our analytics solution with a few customers. Initially, this was a deeply customized process aimed at – what were at the time – our key players in a few core industry verticals: Owners, K-12 schools, program managers and general contractors (GCs).
By ensuring our solution could be scaled across these verticals, and using our early adopters’ feedback, we built an offering that could get us 70-80% there in terms of standardized data tracking and reporting.
Project Centric vs. Asset Centric
Kahua follows two methodologies: Project centric for project management and asset centric for asset management. These streamlined methods mean that most of our users track similar types of data, aiming for high standardization. This standardization not only aids in creating a cohesive data structure across our customer base but also enables out-of-the-box analytics.
Our goal was always to prepare for advanced analytics, even if it wasn't explicitly named as such. This foundational work culminated in the roll-out of Kahua Analytics (KA), a robust platform powered by Microsoft Power BI. KA offers powerful dashboards that are both ready-made and customizable to meet specific business needs.
This transition from static reporting and dashboarding to dynamic, interactive analytics has been pivotal.
Kahua Analytics empowers users across the construction lifecycle to make data-driven decisions. It enables effective data tracking, reporting to stakeholders across the organizational and project hierarchies and making fact-based decisions based on a standardized, robust and comprehensive data structure. This data standardization is crucial, but it’s equally important to acknowledge that while the data structure may be standardized, the analysis and insights derived can vary greatly between organizations.
Kahua Analytics in Action
For example, San Juan Unified School District (SJUSD) has saved weeks of man-hours by using Kahua Analytics to roll up its cost and funding data across its programs into one view and financial summary that it can use to reconcile against its accounting systems. Our Portable View Templates automatically pull data from individual Kahua apps to complete the forms and templates required by key stakeholders.
On top of that, Kahua Analytics for Education links all of our cost data, across our fund management, budget, expense and capital planning applications to provide a holistic view on overall financial health. SJUSD is now able to reconcile its accounting system’s data, its actuals, against its broader capital plans. This directly translates to SJUSD’s ability to make data-driven decisions like raising key bonds, issuing project funding and addressing cost discrepancies at an early stage. This demonstrates the practical, time-saving benefits of our analytics solution.
In the retail space, Floor & Decor is actively using Kahua Analytics to help in its long-term planning efforts, increasing visibility on their capital projects throughout their complex hierarchy, and in its internal operational goals, promoting task ownership and workload visibility through performance metrics. Kahua Analytics for Owner provides extensive workflow, portfolio and capital plan management dashboards that can be tailored to meet cross-hierarchy needs by employing Kahua’s permissions, data security and role management solutions.
Floor & Decor reports that the Kahua product is robust and powerful, offering a single, dynamic and data-rich access point tailored to its business processes, as well as a seamless integration into its existing project controls. While on the fence about pursuing their own analytics dashboards through a third-party cloud solution, what ultimately drew the company to using Kahua’s built-in and tailored Analytics has been the ability to enhance the dashboards on its own and be part of the iterative data science process.
Accurate Data at "Few Clicks of a Button"
Here’s what a Kahua user has to say about these new capabilities: "What Kahua Analytics means to us is that day to day, we can manage what’s going on in real time instead of setting hours aside to run reports and compile them. The quicker we can do that, the more productive we – as leaders – can be, the more productive our team can be, as we are coaching them in the right direction. For us to have good, accurate info at a few clicks of a button is invaluable."
Kahua’s analytics capabilities include tracking key project information, quickly accessing information on project risk and visualizing data across multiple projects. The platform is cloud-hosted, ensuring high-level security and offers flexible configurations to meet various business needs. Pre-built dashboards designed with industry best practices help users save time and money while ensuring data security.
In essence, Kahua Analytics has transformed our approach to data, enabling powerful, data-driven insights that support decision-making across the construction industry. As we continue to evolve, we aim to integrate advanced AI and machine learning capabilities to further enhance predictive analytics, taking our data strategy to new heights.
