Data warehousing for construction

Construction organizations constantly generate a great amount of project data that are distributed across various functional databases to support daily operations. Those databases are typically maintained separately by responsible departments in a construction company. Data sharing can be difficult between management functions. A decision-making process may be slowed if data obtained from different sources conflict with each other. A central database collecting data from existing databases and providing timely access and quality of data, is needed for analyzing the business so that essential business decisions can be made appropriately and promptly. Construction business is widely recognized as project-oriented with projects as its products. All data are associated with projects and decisions are made for projects. Collecting and maintaining data in relation to projects sound practical and logical in order to maximize future usage. This research proposed the Project-Oriented Data Warehouse (PDW) and data populating technology for large and medium construction companies. The PDW not only models the flow of information from operational support systems to decision support environments in the context of construction projects but also underlines the project-oriented nature of the construction business. The data populating technology of the PDW can retrieve construction project data stored either in databases or in stand-alone systems.