Data-Driven Decision-Making: real-time construction market monitoring to enhance operational efficiency
Summary
The construction industry is facing increasing pressure as it experiences the repercussions of
the ongoing housing crisis. This forces companies within this industry to make cost-cutting
efforts, which, to begin with, necessitates clear financial insight, a challenge for contractor
firm VORM 2050. We examined how internal and public data can be leveraged for the
employees to gain real-time economic insight to be able to assess incoming quotations,
ultimately enhancing informed decision-making. Public construction market data resources
were combined into a pooled cost index, in which weights were calculated based on internal
quotations from manufacturer partners. Using R’s ‘shiny’ package, we integrated the pooled
index into a dashboard that enables users to benchmark a quotation against another quotation
of choice. Also, it enables users to recalculate a quotation to a different point in time to assess
its price under the market’s condition at that particular moment. To obtain economic insights,
the dashboard incorporates a customisable visualisation of real-time market volatilities
relevant to construction.