Construcciones Yamaro: How spatial intelligence can improve construction productivity
Spatial intelligence can give construction teams a more accurate view of what is happening on site before delays and rework take hold.
Despite years of focus on productivity, construction projects continue to lose time through rework, delays and inefficient processes. For Michael Cook, director of solutions and customer success at Cupix, the physical construction work is usually not the bottleneck; it is the time spent searching for information, coordinating across disconnected systems and determining the appropriate path forward.
That lost time can begin with poor coordination between the office and site, as delivery teams wait for updated drawings, clarifications, approvals or responses to requests for information before work can proceed.
It can continue through progress reporting, with teams collecting thousands of site photos, updating spreadsheets and registers, and manually tracking the program. As those records are compiled across different parts of the project, they can become disconnected or outdated.
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At the same time, project documentation and construction activity can progress independently. Plans, schedules and models show what should be happening, but if teams cannot continually validate them against what has actually been built, deviations can go undetected.
“The impacts often extend well beyond the bounds of the original issue – what may have started as a minor deviation or easily resolvable defect can quickly escalate to program delays, additional costs, and safety and quality concerns,” says Cook.
Trade sequencing then becomes harder to manage. Construction programs depend on one activity being completed before another can begin, so teams need reliable information about which areas are ready for the next stage of work. Without it, labour and equipment can be deployed inefficiently and subsequent activities disrupted.
“In many cases, project and site teams operate reactively as resources are redirected, activities are resequenced and decisions are made under increased time pressure to recover lost ground,” says Cook.
The issue is not a lack of project information. Teams already have drawings, photographs, reports, schedules and other data. What they can lack, says Cook, is real-time spatial intelligence about what is happening on site and where delivery begins to diverge from design or schedule.
“Better visibility into site conditions and project status is one of the biggest opportunities to improve productivity today, ensuring construction projects keep to program and narrowing the gap between planned and actual,” he says.
“Equally important is the ability to consolidate the information generated by stakeholders into a single lens, allowing for anyone to interrogate the documentation, designs, schedules, site progress and field conditions in context. This would allow stakeholders to move beyond siloed data and move toward collaborative and holistic decision making.”
A trusted project record
A reliable, shared record of site conditions changes the way project teams coordinate and make decisions. Spatial capture can create a time-aware record of what exists, what has changed and how site conditions compare with design and schedule. Rather than relying on individual updates, whether they are photos, status reports or assumptions, teams can see what has been installed and quickly identify completed and outstanding works.
“This improves coordination between stakeholders and site teams, helps identify any challenges on the horizon and enables decisions for specific outcomes to be made based on current site conditions and project data, rather than interpretation or incomplete information,” says Cook.
Earlier identification gives teams more time to manage risk, maintain safety standards and address issues before they affect cost or program. For contractors and trades, the commercial benefit also extends to resource deployment, completion and cash-flow forecasting, material deliveries, procured asset management, commissioning and commercial discussions.
“I’ve seen many active construction situations where leveraging high-quality, up-to-date spatial captures provided the necessary substantiation for progress claims and helped resolve variation disputes amicably,” says Cook. “In some instances, having the spatial capture saved an amount five times greater than the cost of the capture, and in one instance, close to 10 times greater.”
Reliable site verification is particularly important on data centres and other complex infrastructure projects, where dense services installations, tight construction tolerances and highly sequenced activities demand close coordination across multiple trades, systems and stakeholders. Even minor deviations can affect the program, commissioning and operational readiness. Cook says accurate verification during delivery creates confidence that critical systems have been installed as designed, providing a trusted record of asset locations and asset data.
“This establishes a reliable foundation for operations and ongoing facility management,” he says. “Given the long operational life and criticality of these environments, having access to accurate asset information helps owners manage their maintenance activities and sets a foundation to determine the best way to leverage data for the lifecycle of the facility.”
The information captured during construction does not lose its value at practical completion. Its purpose changes, becoming a historical record of how the asset was actually built and giving owners and operators a verified reference point after handover.
The future of project data
For Cook, the next step is making greater use of the information generated across projects.
“The industry is increasingly recognising the value of project data and how the data does not exclusively reside within the design and construction phase as ‘just BIM data’. It is extremely important beyond that. Project data is leveraged for multiple use cases, including operations, asset maintenance, lifecycle planning and reuse,” he says.
“Rather than seeing information as a project deliverable popped on the shelf to collect dust, there is a growing focus on construction teams to treat it as a long-term asset that’s leveraged by facilities managers and owners, who can use spatial intelligence to inform repeatable processes and future projects.”
Owners are also placing greater contractual emphasis on accurate, structured and connected information that can support asset performance, maintenance and future upgrades. Cook says this is putting more attention on how contractors capture, manage and validate project information during delivery so it remains useful and accessible once construction is complete.
“This shift towards data-driven project delivery is becoming a key part of the construction industry’s broader digital transformation journey,” he says. “As confidence and maturity develop, the industry will leverage the information gathered as pre-emptive and predictive information for decision-making across a range of uses, including estimation, quality, safety, carbon tracking, design, material tracking, procurement, cost forecasting and programming.”
That information can also give AI a useful role, but Cook says its value is not in making decisions on behalf of construction teams. Instead, AI can help people access and interpret project information while engineering judgement, trade experience and project expertise remain central to the decision-making process. Its usefulness, however, still depends on the accuracy of the site information available.
“Smart companies in the industry will leverage site information in numerous ways, coupled with AI, to provide a competitive advantage and build a sustainable, smarter, data-centric future.”
To learn more about how spatial intelligence can help improve project certainty and productivity, visit cupix.com
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