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Information is power. There’s no time where that’s more true than in this era. Data relevance has ascended to a scale where it’s almost a currency. With the right information, anything is possible. Yet despite this fact, the construction industry today has foregone many of these benefits. Precious information in the construction industry moves at a slow pace. It lives in paper receipts, email inboxes, disparate spreadsheets, and invoices, in a slow inefficient process.
In other blog posts, we’ve discussed how Briq runs your processes to receive data from all fronts for use and analysis. Now, we’d like to discuss both what you can do with that data to elevate your business and how Briq’s platform has built-in functionality to help you achieve that.
So let’s talk numbers. Let’s talk about how you can weaponize your data.
Coordinate your departments in real-time
For some time now, communication between departments has been something of a pony express for the construction industry. The field personnel sends information up to management at a sporadic rate. Management spends time balancing other duties with this information collection until, finally, it ends up in the hands of the finance team.
Each company has its own system for this, but they all are slower than they need to be. The finance department stays in their silo with information taking anywhere from two weeks to a whole quarter to reach them. All of this doesn’t even touch on the goose chase for paper receipts and what was spent by who and where.
Just being able to organize it all digitally is already a huge success, but what if there was more? What if data collection changed more than just the files the information sits on? What if it changed the way your teams communicate and supercharged the flow of data?
Our platform doesn’t just sort the data, it changes the way it’s obtained. Our interface prompts professionals across teams to enter relevant data as soon as they get it into an intuitive, easy-to-use, system. What this means is that your finance team is no longer waiting weeks to receive information, whether it’s a receipt for a hammer or a larger invoice.
Our platform doesn’t just sort the data, it changes the way it’s obtained.
With instant data flow across your departments, your finance team can advise both operations and field departments on how to make a project more profitable in real-time. Rather than analyzing completed stages or cash flow issues that happened weeks ago, they can advise on what changes need to be made today to improve profits and make the lives of those on the ground floor easier.
With Briq enabling a tight data flow, all of your teams will have the tools to communicate and support each other as a holistic company, not just a single department.
Make predictions with confidence and accuracy
To succeed in the construction industry, where profit margins are considered slim on average, planning is key. Whether or not the project is as profitable as it should be isn’t even half the battle. Issues of cash flow, labor management, equipment acquisition, and ongoing bids are all factors that need to be delicately balanced for the company to turn a profit and deliver on its projects.
Planning is key
Due to the aforementioned data flow issues, this delicate balance is hard to strike. Construction analysts often draw up their models based on faulty data, or worse, they’re forced to assume what past data might look like before it’s even received just to keep pace with planning. This makes the work of your finance team incredibly demanding and more difficult than it needs to be. Consider that if they’re skilled enough to keep their heads above water with slow data, and assumption-based projection, what could they do with fast, accurate information? What if your analysts had to spend less time dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s, and more time projecting, because they had a system in place for it?
With the data collected from Briq, your analysts will have that system. Thanks to Briq’s automations, data only ever needs to be entered once, there’s no need to hunt down specific spreadsheets, receipts, or invoices anymore. They also don’t need to make guesses based on what they’ve seen. With just a few clicks, the information they need to make predictions will be up on the screen for them in the format that works best for them.
Instead of broad strokes of predictions, your analysts will be able to confidently project and calculate key finance data down to the decimal point, reducing the margin of error to as little as possible. Whatever information they need to make a more holistic plan will be available and accurate in an instant.
At its core, Briq gives you the tools to decide for yourself what data is and isn’t useful. With everything on the table, the only limit is the imagination of your analysts. Instead of using a limited toolbox with logistical constraints, they’ll be unrestricted to pursue whatever models or planning they think could better support the business. With all the data at your fingertips, everything becomes optimizable, allowing for new and improved planning and prediction.
Automate your best models
Finance is famous for being an individualized process. Get CFOs from different companies in a room, and each one will balk at how ludicrous the other one’s process is. Each company has a different way of planning, it’s the secret recipe to their brand of success. It’s what allows them to stand out and specialize in whatever it is that they do best. Your financial professionals know the system like the back of their hands. So why not give them the tools to lean into it?
Briq features machine learning and automation modules as a part of its platform. What this means is that you can take your tried and true process, and automate it.
The fully customizable nature of Briq will allow you to develop a process that happens instantaneously when the data is collected, taking all the formulas you’ve spread across individual spreadsheets and unifying them into a single workflow. At the end of it all, you’re left with the dynamic dashboard of information that your team uses, without the hours of labor spent to process the data and input it into a system. Additionally, you can be sure that any data that pertains to your models is included in the graph due to Briq’s reliable data collection process. No second-guessing if somebody forgot to include an invoice or accidentally adjusted a spreadsheet.
With Briq, any repetitive finance task can be automated, giving your professionals the power to do more with their data, turning it from a barrier to a weapon for success.
Make your data a tool, not an obstacle
What’s covered here is only skimming the surface of what you can do with Briq. It’s a broad overview. The more your team familiarizes themselves with the system, the more they can implement, add and discover. The customizable nature of our platform means that if you can think of it, you can create the process for it. Data will stop being a process of trickle-down collection, spread throughout multiple platforms. Instead, it will be an automatic, available tool, ready at a moment’s notice for immediate implementation.
What are you waiting for? Contact us for a demo and find out how you can weaponize your data with Briq.
