Beautiful charts, graphs and animations are meaningless if the data used to create them is full of holes.

That’s the gist of our blog post published on Nov. 18 at AEC Business, which focuses on construction innovation and technology and has a global audience of professionals who are interested in subjects such as digitalization of the industry, lean construction, materials technology, industrialization, sustainability and business improvement.

Thanks to Aarni Heiskanen, a Top 100 Influencer in construction, for inviting us to contribute to AEC’s excellent website. A Managing Partner at AE Partners, Aarni has a master’s degree in architecture and worked for more than a decade as an architect and architectural R&D manager before founding AEC Business, which offers a podcast in addition to the blog.

The title of our first blog post for AEC is “Keeping it Clean: Analytics Can Benefit Contractors—So Long as They Maintain Good ‘Data Hygiene.” In the column, we point out that under the right circumstances shifting from siloed spreadsheets to advanced data warehouses and analytics engines can yield transformative insights. For many contractors, though, a necessary first step is to take a better approach to “data hygiene”—the process of making sure the information in your accounting, bid and other systems is accurate and complete.

As we note in the piece,

“A flawed approach to data entry—especially the need for different stakeholders to manually enter data into different systems multiple times—tends to be the root of the problem…

In a worst-case scenario, faulty or incomplete data in categories such as vendors, subcontractors, employees, equipment, materials or project costs undermines a contractor’s good-faith effort to base its strategy on the facts.“