Data Integration and Analysis Solution

The vendor is required to provide data integration and analysis solution to leverage the data it collects on all capital projects to perform comprehensive data analytics and project reporting that would facilitate data-driven decision making.
- Project management information system:
•    Design change requests
•    Submittals
•    Drawings
•    Contracts, task orders, and commitments
•    Invoices
•    Potential change orders and change orders
•    Project charters
•    Budgets and forecasts
•    Individual project construction schedules and design schedules
•    Milestone performance reports
- Schedule management system:
•    Master schedules for the entire portfolio within the authority capital plan with a standard list of activities within each project
•    Estimates at completion for cost for each project
•    Project baselines (schedule and cost)
•    Project codes as managed by the project controls group
- Contract management system:
•    Contracts
•    Task orders
•    Commitments
•    Purchase orders
•    Budgets
•    Funding sources and grants
•    Actual costs
•    Executed change orders and amendments
- The financial management information system:
•    Purchase orders
•    Actual costs
•    Commitments
•    Invoices and requisitions
•    Authority internal costs
- Stored and managed in excel spreadsheets:
•    Authority capital plan
•    Quarterly cash flow projections
•    Quarterly report narratives
- BI tools like tableau or power BI include:
1. Data ingestions from internal systems
•    Relies on internal resources to create connections to the different systems 
•    Connections are dependent on access to databases, APIs - if the data is not available in the database access or API, the team cannot report on it (e.g., comments on processes, documents attached to processes in e-builder) 
•    Relies on internal resources to maintain the connections which can get very costly as the system and data volume scale across all projects
2. Data ingestion from external systems
•    This creates a reliance on internal resources to create connections to the different systems where each project has a different contractor and different systems utilized on the project. 
•    This is almost impossible to accomplish with internal resources
•    If internal resources are available, contractors typically provide read only access to the authority team but not API access. 
•    That makes it impossible to collect the data on a large scale.
3. Data quality and cleanup
•    Typically, the data quality is not perfectly aligned when connecting multiple data sources which requires extensive data quality review and resources to accomplish.
4. Data from documents
•    Most of the granular data required to truly improve decision making is found in lengthy pdfs (100s of pages) and tableau does not offer capabilities to extract data from files.
5. Ad hoc question answering
•    BI tools only offer answers to questions if extensive manual effort is spent understanding the business need and creating dashboards for different use cases. 
•    If the users want to drill down into data that may be available in the system or available in pdfs but not available on the dashboard, they must request a data analyst to create the data and create the dashboard.