InEight, the Arizona-based tech firm set on revolutionizing global construction project management, debuts its new platform to boost management intelligence for scheduling, risk assessment, and planning.
Its updated Planning, Scheduling, and Risk platform have seen an upgrade, driven by artificial intelligence (AI) combined with data and feedback from previous projects to identify threats in new projects better and find ways to mitigate risk further.
"Getting an accurate picture of total risk exposure across an entire capital project in real time has been something reserved for organizations with big budgets and a dedicated risk expert on staff," shares InEight head of product, scheduling, and risk Nathan St. John. He adds that with the updated InEight platform, users now have "a complete cloud-based solution that continuously monitors total project risk, finds threats and then takes the extra step of surfacing and prioritizing mitigation options."
InEight's New Features
One of the main new features in the Planning, Scheduling, and Risk platform is its "Multiple Risk Mitigation Assignments and Tracking," which collates available data to help generate the cost schedule risk assessment report (CSRA). With the comprehensive summary, project managers can easily find spots in the operation that pose a risk on overall costs and completion time. Lastly, its Multiple Risk Mitigation Assignments and Tracking is driven by AI, coming up with possible mitigation actions users can choose from.
Risk analysis now gets easier with the Schedule Critique - an ever-present AI assistant that guides and offers suggestions for scheduling improvement, highlighting potential issues, and providing feedback.
InEight's platform also offers Enhanced Risk Register and Cost Risk support. With the Enhanced Risk Register, users can easily monitor threat management and advanced categorization, tracking, and risk analysis, even across multiple projects. On the other hand, Cost Risk now takes its analysis from cost and schedule - two key pillars of effective project control - to provide a holistic approach to risk analysis.
Connected Data Connecting Owners and Contractors
In a statement, InEight has stated that transparent data and real-time access to information improve trust between contractors and their customers. Additionally, this best practice could even help the chances of construction providers to bag project bids.
The company has launched a webinar last December, explaining how a Common Data Environment (CDE) that focuses on schedule and cost integration offers a balanced assessment of risk and creates transparency.
Dan Patterson, Chief Design Officer for InEight, explains how technology - and his experience in it - has advanced the science of Critical Path Method (CPM) scheduling.
"As you know, CPM scheduling has sort of been the backbone for forecasting CapEx projects, and so adding to the mix things like risk analysis to help with increasing the accuracy of those forecasts," Patterson explains. He adds that InEight, which has leveraged the latest AI and machine learning technologies, is moving towards what he termed as "knowledge-driven planning."
He also recognized the value of unstructured data, doing away with the previous convention of using formal SQL databases to store particular information related to the project.
