Challenges
Challenges
Information loss
The cost of a record no one can find
£1.8 trillion
Lost by the global construction industry in 2020 due to poor data and information loss.
Source: Autodesk/FMI, "Harnessing the Data Advantage in Construction"
Every project generates its own correspondence trail, instructions, approvals, clarifications, changes of mind. Most of it lives in individual inboxes, not in a shared, structured project record.
That's fine, until it isn't. A project lead moves to a new role. A subcontractor's point of contact changes. Someone leaves the business mid-project. Whatever they filed properly stays. Whatever sat in their inbox goes with them or gets left behind in an archive nobody else can navigate.
The firm doesn't find out there's a hole in the record until it needs something specific from it, a decision, an instruction, a sign-off and can't find it.
This isn't a training problem or a discipline problem. It's what happens by default when the project record depends on individual inboxes rather than a shared system. The fix isn't asking people to file more diligently. It's removing the dependency on them remembering to.
Dispute resolution
Almost half of rework starts with a missed message
48%
Of all construction rework in the US is driven by poor data and miscommunication — not design errors or workmanship.
Source: PlanGrid/FMI, "Construction Disconnected"
When a dispute surfaces, the firm that wins isn't necessarily the one that was right. It's the one that can prove it.
That proof usually comes down to correspondence: who instructed what, when, and whether it was actioned. If that correspondence is scattered across personal inboxes, buried in threads, or simply gone because someone's left, the firm is arguing from memory rather than from a record.
Construction disputes aren't rare or quick. They average $60.1 million in value and take 12.5 months to resolve in North America (Arcadis Global Construction Disputes Report 2025). Over that timeline, the correspondence that mattered on day one has to still be findable on day 375, not just present somewhere, but retrievable, complete, and attributable to the right project and the right person.
Firms that can produce a complete, timestamped record go into a dispute from a position of strength. Firms that can't are negotiating from a position of hope.
Audit readiness
Policy isn't proof. A record is.
Under the Building Safety Act's golden thread requirement, firms must demonstrate, not just assert a continuous, accurate digital record across a building's entire lifecycle.
Source: UK Building Safety Act 2022 / HSE guidance
ISO 19650, ISO 9001 and the Building Safety Act don't ask firms to have a policy. They ask firms to demonstrate that the policy was followed consistently, across every project, by every person.
That's a different bar. A policy document tells an auditor what should have happened. It doesn't tell them what did happen. The gap between the two is exactly what an audit is designed to find.
Most firms can point to intent, a filing protocol, a document management system, an information management plan. Fewer can pull up a complete, retrievable, time-stamped correspondence trail for a live project on request, by close of business, without someone spending a week chasing it down manually.
Audit readiness isn't about having the right policy on paper. It's about being able to produce the evidence the moment it's asked for, without notice and without a scramble.
