By [Suresh Sandanandan], Chief Technology Officer, Surtori
Last month, I sat in a boardroom with a mid-sized contractor—£75M annual revenue, respectable backlog, solid reputation. The MD showed me their technology “stack”: project management software, digital estimating tools, field reporting apps, AI-powered scheduling, even some ML for cost prediction. On paper, they looked like a digital leader.
Then I asked a simple question: “When your estimator prices a job, can they see what the same work actually cost you on your last three projects?”
Silence.
“Can your site manager see updated material costs when they’re approving change orders?”
More silence.
“Does your scheduling AI know about the supply chain delay that just hit your steel supplier?”
The answer, of course, was no. And in those three “no” answers, I could see roughly £2.3M in annual margin—about 3% of their revenue—evaporating into thin air.
After twenty years deploying assistive technology in construction, I’ve seen this pattern hundreds of times. Companies are spending small fortunes on technology while leaving millions on the table because nobody’s connected the dots. Let me show you what I mean.
The Margin Bleed Nobody Talks About
Construction operates on razor-thin margins. If you’re hitting 5-6% net profit, you’re doing well. Get to 8-10%, and you’re in the top quartile. The difference between those two brackets? It’s often not about winning better work or cutting labour costs. It’s about stopping the silent margin bleed that happens when your technology doesn’t talk to itself.
Here’s what that bleed looks like in practice:
Estimating errors eating 2-3% of revenue. I’ve watched estimators build brilliant bids using sophisticated software, completely disconnected from actual project cost data. They’re guessing at productivity rates instead of using real historical data because their estimating system doesn’t talk to their project management system. When I pull the actual numbers, estimating errors typically account for 30-35% of cost overruns. That’s not estimator incompetence—it’s technology failure.
Non-productive time consuming 35% of labour hours. Your field teams spend over a third of their time looking for information, waiting for decisions, or redoing work because of coordination failures. Not because they’re lazy—because the systems that should be giving them real-time information are feeding them data that’s three days old or from the wrong project phase entirely.
Change order chaos leaving money on the table. I’ve seen contractors complete £500K in legitimate change order work and only bill £350K because the approval process is so fragmented that work gets done before it’s properly documented. Your field app captures the scope change, but it doesn’t trigger the estimating system to price it, doesn’t alert the quantity surveyor to document it, and doesn’t update the schedule to show the impact. Six months later, during the final account, you’re trying to reconstruct what happened from memory and partial records.
This isn’t about needing better technology. You’ve already got the technology. The problem is that your £200K/year investment in digital tools is delivering about £30K in value because the tools are working against each other instead of with each other.
The Integration Tax
Let me tell you about a project that crystallized this for me. Main contractor, £24M job, hospital refurbishment. They’d invested heavily in technology: Procore for project management, Conquest for estimating, Powerproject for scheduling, custom apps for safety and quality. Good tools, all of them.
Three months in, they’re running 15% over budget and two weeks behind programme. The MD called us in, convinced they had a site management problem. But when we mapped the data flows, the real issue became obvious:
Their estimator had priced the mechanical rough-in based on historical productivity data—but that data was from a different project type, pulled manually from old spreadsheets, because the estimating system didn’t have access to actual project cost data.
The planner built the schedule with standard durations—without knowing that the actual installation rates on their last two projects were 30% slower than standard because of the site access constraints typical in occupied healthcare facilities.
The site team was making day-to-day decisions based on drawings that were two revisions old because the document control system wasn’t integrated with the field app.
The quantity surveyor was tracking costs in yet another system, which meant the early warning signs of overrun weren’t visible to the people who could have done something about them.
No single system failure. Just a dozen small disconnects, each bleeding margin.
We spent six weeks connecting their systems—not replacing them, just getting them to talk to each other. The result? They recovered 2.1% in margin over the remaining nine months of the project. On a £24M job, that’s over £500K recovered from integration alone.
The Quick ROI Framework
Here’s what I’ve learned from deploying assistive technology across hundreds of projects: You don’t need to rip everything out and start over. You need to fix the three critical disconnects that are costing you the most money, and you can do it in 90 days.
Phase 1 (Weeks 1-4): Connect Estimating to Actuals
The single highest-ROI integration you can make. Your estimating system should have direct access to actual project cost data—not manually exported spreadsheets, not quarterly reports, but real-time or near-real-time actuals.
Implementation: Usually requires middleware or API connections between your estimating and project management platforms. If you’re on modern systems, this is straightforward. If you’re on legacy systems, you may need a data warehouse as an intermediary.
Expected impact: 1.5-2% margin improvement through eliminating the largest estimating errors. On a £50M/year business, that’s £750K-£1M annually.
Phase 2 (Weeks 5-8): Real-Time Field Data to Planning
Your planners should see what’s actually happening on site, not what was supposed to happen. Connect your field reporting (daily logs, progress tracking, issue reporting) directly to your planning systems.
Implementation: This often requires mobile-first thinking. Your site teams need to be able to update progress from their phones in a way that automatically updates the programme. We’ve had success with custom integrations between field apps and scheduling tools, or by implementing platforms that do both natively.
Expected impact: 0.5-1% margin improvement through reducing delays and improving resource allocation. Plus significant soft benefits in reduced replanning time and better subcontractor coordination.
Phase 3 (Weeks 9-12): Integrated Change Management
Build a single workflow that captures scope changes, triggers estimating, updates the programme, and routes approvals automatically. Every change should flow from capture to billing without manual handoffs.
Implementation: This is typically the most complex integration because it cuts across multiple systems and departments. But it’s also where contractors leave the most money on the table.
Expected impact: 0.5-1.5% margin improvement through capturing revenue you’re currently missing and reducing disputes over entitlement.
Total expected margin improvement: 2.5-4.5% within 12 months of starting. For a £50M contractor, that’s £1.25M to £2.25M in additional profit—typically a 50-100% increase in net profit.
The Hidden Risk in Your Vendor Contracts
Now I will share with you something that will probably keep you up at night: While you’re bleeding margin from disconnected systems, you’re also potentially haemorrhaging competitive intelligence through your vendor relationships.
I get calls from contractors who’ve just realized that the AI-powered estimating tool they’ve been using for three years has been learning from their data—their productivity rates, their subcontractor relationships, their pricing strategies. And then offering “industry benchmarking” to their competitors based on aggregated insights that include the original contractor’s proprietary knowledge.
This isn’t theoretical. I’ve reviewed hundreds of SaaS contracts in the construction space, and I’d estimate that 70-80% of them include data usage clauses that would shock the executives who signed them. Clauses that allow the vendor to:
- Use your project data to train machine learning models
- Aggregate your cost data with other customers’ for “benchmarking”
- Share anonymized insights that aren’t really anonymous if you understand the market
- Retain access to your data even after you leave the platform
Here’s a real example: A specialty subcontractor using an AI-powered procurement platform. They’d achieved fantastic results—15% reduction in material costs through better supplier negotiations. But the platform was learning their negotiation strategies, their supplier relationships, their project timing. Two years later, three of their direct competitors signed up for the same platform. Within six months, their competitive advantage had evaporated because the AI was now giving their competitors insights derived from the original contractor’s data.
The margin integration problem and the data security problem are actually the same problem: a fundamental lack of joined-up thinking about technology strategy. When you’re making purchasing decisions system by system, department by department, you’re not just creating integration gaps—you’re creating security gaps.
What “Joined-Up Thinking” Actually Looks Like
I’ve worked with enough high-performing contractors to know it’s achievable. Best-in-class contractors treat their technology ecosystem as a single integrated platform, even when it’s built from multiple vendors. They have:
A clear data architecture. They know what data they’re generating, where it lives, how it flows, and who has access to it. Before they buy any new tool, they map where it fits in the ecosystem and what integration is required.
A clear technology investment roadmap. They know what technology investments are going to deliver the largest return for the business. This is not based on assumptions or who shouts loudest but a strategy with clear ROI from each project.
Unified governance. Technology decisions aren’t made by IT alone or by departments in isolation. There’s a cross-functional team—operations, finance, IT, legal—that evaluates every technology decision against both operational and security criteria.
Strict vendor due diligence. Every contract includes explicit data usage clauses. They know exactly what the vendor can and can’t do with their data, how long data is retained, what happens when the contract ends, and whether their data will be aggregated with competitors’.
Integration-first implementation. When they buy new technology, the integration plan comes before the rollout plan. They don’t consider a system “live” until it’s properly connected to the broader ecosystem.
Continuous optimization. They treat their technology ecosystem as a living thing that needs regular pruning, updating, and optimization. They review integration points quarterly, look for new disconnects, and fix them before they become expensive problems.
The contractors who do this well typically see 3-5% better margins than their peers, even when they’re competing for the same work at similar pricing. The difference isn’t in their estimating—it’s in their execution. They waste less, capture more change order revenue, finish closer to programme, and make better decisions because they’re working with connected, comprehensive data.
The Path Forward: Starting Monday
If you’re a construction executive reading this and recognizing your company in these patterns, here’s what you should do Monday morning:
Get your data map. Spend a week inventorying every system that touches financial data—estimating, project management, accounting, field apps, scheduling, procurement, everything. Draw out how data flows between them. Every manual export, every spreadsheet, every email attachment—map it all. The disconnects will be obvious.
Calculate your margin bleed. For your last five completed projects, calculate:
- How much did your estimates miss actuals by? (This is your estimating error cost)
- How much approved change work did you do vs. how much you billed? (This is your change order leakage)
- How much schedule overrun did you have, and what did it cost? (This is your planning failure cost)
Add those up. I guarantee you’re looking at 2-5% of revenue.
Audit your vendor contracts. Pull every SaaS agreement and look for data usage clauses. If you don’t understand what you’ve agreed to, get legal counsel who specializes in technology contracts to review them. You may be shocked at what you’ve signed.
Build your 90-day integration roadmap. Pick the three highest-ROI integrations and resource them properly. This isn’t an IT project—it’s a margin recovery project. Treat it accordingly.
Establish integration governance. No more standalone technology decisions. Every new tool gets evaluated for how it fits the ecosystem, what integration is required, and what data security implications it has.
The Bottom Line
After two decades in this industry, I’ve watched construction companies invest enormous sums in technology while leaving millions in margin on the table. Not because they bought the wrong tools, but because they bought them wrong—one at a time, system by system, without thinking about how they’d work together or what they’d expose.
The good news? This is fixable. You don’t need a massive digital transformation programme or a five-year roadmap. You need 90 days, some middleware, and the willingness to think about your technology as an integrated ecosystem rather than a collection of point solutions.
The contractors who figure this out—who connect their systems, protect their data, and treat technology as a competitive weapon rather than a cost center—they’re the ones pulling away from the pack. They’re operating at 8-10% margins while their competitors struggle at 5-6%. They’re winning work on value rather than price. They’re growing even in difficult markets.
The technology is ready. The ROI is proven. The only question is whether you’re ready to stop bleeding margin and start capturing it.
And if you’re still not sure? Look at your last project’s final account. Find the gap between what you estimated and what actually happened. Find the change orders you did but didn’t get paid for. Find the time lost to rework and coordination failures.
That’s your margin bleed. That’s what disconnected technology is costing you.
Now ask yourself: Can you afford to let that continue?
If you’re struggling to connect your construction technology ecosystem or want to discuss how integrated systems can improve your margins, I’m always happy to talk with fellow construction professionals about what actually works in the field. The lessons I’ve learned didn’t come from vendor presentations—they came from the mud.