Burger Consulting Group is involved in a lot of ERP replacements now, both selection and implementation. Contractors have grown weary of their legacy ERP and lack of functionality or poor tech stack. Contractors are also a little concerned about the availability of solutions; the demands and expectations from ERP have outstripped the growth of the existing products. Some are certainly in a better position than others, but it is unclear whether the existing solutions will serve construction needs over the next ten years or perhaps a new group of applications will emerge to meet the demand. The situation has reached a point where I am getting asked to facilitate panel discussions and present to association meetings on this very topic.

We have also helped contractors to better implement the systems they already have and deploy some of their newly acquired solutions. We are continually amazed that many contractors have fairly good solutions though only partially implemented. They initially want help replacing these solutions though given the chance, we are pretty good at keeping the solution in place and improving the implementation.

The industry itself is extremely busy with IT and data management initiatives. Cybersecurity has moved up the priority list by several factors. Companies are training personnel, putting in better protections, and getting cyber insurance policies in place. The actual underwriting standards for cyber insurance policies are helping contractors see just how exposed they are and what they need to do to mitigate their risk and be in compliance with their policy.

Contracting firm management is definitely becoming “data aware”.  They want better data so they can begin to report and track KPIs, trends, and comparative metrics. They see all the great dashboards their PM and ERP solutions can produce or even KPIs through Tableau or PowerBI and want that level of visibility and real-time information. But what isn’t being talked about are the challenges we have with underlying data. Many of the older systems in use have less than pristine data. Business processes are not consistently followed making matters worse. Tableau graphs on top of bad data will still look good but won’t be accurate. Companies are also getting serious about developing their data warehouse strategies and using middleware to transform and populate. Angus Frost has been helping our clients with their data strategies.

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