Lydon Solutions

Construction Project Management Software Solutions

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Use AI to Help Manage Your Construction Projects with Microsoft SharePoint Syntex

Microsoft News |

Microsoft SharePoint Syntex is an AI tool available as an add-on for Microsoft 365 that construction organizations can use to manage project data more efficiently.

Information management is one of the biggest challenges for any organization. But in construction, it is not just about internal project information management. Compounding the problem's complexity for construction managers and owners is the additional burden of managing the flood of data that their vendors and contractors submit daily (e.g., submittals, RFIs, change orders, and invoices).

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Shortcomings of typical project data management methods

Construction organizations have typically processed and managed external project information in one of two ways:

Option 1 – Ask contractors to use the construction manager or owner's project management information system (PMIS)

This approach centralizes data, ensuring that project information resides in a single system of record for processing.

However, using this method adds significant costs and raises the risk of errors.  For example, it entails considerable effort in training and hand-holding for every contractor using the PMIS. It also often requires additional document control staff to review and correct technical and data input issues. Finally, contractors typically increase their bids to account for the redundant data entry required to support two systems.

Option 2 – Have contractors email project correspondence (usually as PDFs) to the construction manager or owner for manual entry into their PMIS

This second approach has document control specialists entering data into the system-of-record PMIS, providing a clean and centralized repository for project information.

Unfortunately, this method only shifts the burden of processing project records from the contractors to the owner or construction manager. Thus, while it improves data accuracy, there are still issues of increased cost and significant manual effort.

Using Microsoft SharePoint Syntex to automate project data management

If your organization is on Microsoft 365 and uses SharePoint for construction project management, the good news is that there is a better way to manage your data. Microsoft has recently released SharePoint Syntex, an AI tool for automating content processing.

With SharePoint Syntex, once you train your AI model to classify and extract data from PDFs, the tool will be able to take over and run on a specific document library in SharePoint. The AI model will extract metadata from a PDF document and add it to SharePoint columns once you upload new files.

What does Microsoft SharePoint Syntex mean for construction?

With SharePoint Syntex, there is now a third way to manage and process your construction project information. Using SharePoint Syntex, contractors do not have to learn a new system, nor would the owner or construction managers have to process project correspondence from the contractor manually.  Instead, contractors could email project correspondence to the owner or construction manager. A trained Syntex AI model could then review the documents and automatically classify them based on a predefined set of rules. While this may sound like science fiction, it's not, and it's available right now for SharePoint in Microsoft 365.

What does Microsoft SharePoint Syntex cost?

Syntex for SharePoint is available as a cost-per-user add-on in Microsoft 365. The pricing posted on the SharePoint Syntex pricing page at the time of this article is $5/user per month or $60/year.

How to get started using Microsoft SharePoint Syntex?

Once you pay for a SharePoint Syntex user license and create a content center in SharePoint, you can start building AI models.

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We'll get into the details in future posts on this subject and possibly some online training sessions.

Get Help Using Microsoft SharePoint Syntex to Manage Your Construction Projects

Lydon Solutions always embraces leading-edge Microsoft technology to improve construction projects' efficiency.  We have already built AI models that extract invoice data from PDF invoices emailed into a Microsoft 365 group mailbox. As soon as the file is uploaded, the AI tool automatically extracts data for reporting and analysis. It's exciting stuff!

If you have any questions about setting up SharePoint Syntex for your Microsoft 365 or need a turnkey enterprise PMIS integrated with SharePoint like Construction Viz, don't hesitate to reach out to us for a no-obligation consultation and demo. We're here to help!

Bots and Project Management Information Systems (PMIS)

Reviews |

How bots and machine learning could impact construction project management 

Bots are a hot topic right now. Tech giants from Google, Facebook and Microsoft and automakers like Toyota are betting big on bots as a critical cutting-edge technology. And they aren’t alone. Thought leaders and entrepreneurs in virtually every industry and sector are exploring bot technology.

If you haven’t been following the hype, a bot is an application of artificial intelligence.  Basically, it is a computer program that fetches and analyzes data.  Some of these bots use machine learning to spot patterns or understand how humans perform tasks and then mimic – and enhance – that behavior.

We’re already starting to see some of these bots popping up for ordering food, booking flights, or as general personal digital assistants. Most of us see these innovations and say “wow, that’s pretty cool” and move on.  But, this is a much bigger transformative technology that is evolving that will reinvent the workplace and re-define the way people work – for better or worse.

Let’s have some fun thinking about the possibilities bot technology could create for business in general and construction project management in particular.

Why I’m All in On The Bot Bandwagon

Here’s why: we’re all being asked to do more with less to stay competitive in business today. At the same time, we must keep quality high. I believe bots and machine learning will help all of us be more agile, efficient and consistent.

Businesses have transitioned to the internet and for that matter the “cloud.”  So all of your data to manage and operate a business is created and transacted online.  Now imagine if we could apply bot technology to the various aspects of our business – finance, accounting, manufacturing, management, etc. – and program the bots to learn from our best practices. They could use machine learning to understand how we work, analyze problems, make decisions, and ultimately get things done.  So in a way they would become an extension of you – allowing everyone in your company to do more with an army of virtual assistants.

Take it a step further. What if you could buy bots that had “learned” from the masters like Warren Buffet for financial investing, or Bill Gates for technology leadership, and so on.  Now your company is drawing on the best of the best in the industry.

Construction Project Management Bots

Now let’s apply this to construction. Bots could transform the way we manage projects. As everyone knows, there are way too many data points to consider when managing a construction project.  There is not enough time in the day or resources to monitor all of them and their interrelationships.
But what if you were able to set up bots that could analyze all of your project data to spot patterns, find anomalies and make correlations. The bots could crunch mountains of data for you, aiding in your decision making and even taking corrective action.

For example, say you have a project risk that is added to your risk register.  That risk could have an impact to your schedule, cost forecast, contingency, scope, change management, and ultimately team communication.

What if a bot could perform multiple scenarios in real time and suggest the best mitigation plan based on your company’s priorities and best practices?  Bots could do all of the detailed analysis across scope, schedule, and budget and surface that information into a mobile device while you walked to over to the planning meeting.

Or consider scheduling. So many factors go into keeping your projects on time and on budget. Imagine if your team was assisted by a scheduling bot that was trained to understand scheduling concepts like schedule crashing and critical path. The bot could generate actionable reports, perform TIAs and make recommendations. You and your team could then make better, more informed decisions based the most accurate data analysis possible.

This all sounds great, but how do we get there?

I hope your mind is racing with some of the questions that will have to be answered like:

  • How could bots be assimilated into a PMIS to collect all of your data and analyze it?
  • What would the new role of a project team be?  Will the focus change from reporting and analysis to data collection and decision-making?
  • Can you teach a bot to learn all of the work experiences one would encounter?
  • How will bots and people work together in the workplace of the future?  Are there qualitative synergies that only occur when humans analyze data together?
  • What is the role of the PM?  Will they perform a QA/QC to the bot or act as a tie breaker?
  • Who does a PM blame when a bad decision is made?

Let me know your thoughts

I believe we all have much to gain in a future where bots are helping accelerate tedious or time-consuming business tasks. But there is understandably a lot of debate about the pros and cons of AI technology. Some fear the dystopian implications of machines becoming too intelligent or self-aware (the singularity).

What do you think? I’d welcome hearing your thoughts in the comments below.