An Introduction to Construction Daily Reports in BIM 360

Over the past decade, the construction industry has undergone a complete digital transformation. Design and construction workflows from documentation to quality and safety have been digitized, generating an enormous amount of information about all aspects of a project. Accessing and utilizing that information in construction daily reports is critical, as it can help teams reduce risk, increase efficiency, and improve project outcomes both right now and in the future.

For this information to be useful, it needs to be shared with the right people and in a format they can use to make decisions. This is where reporting comes in. BIM 360 captures a large amount of information through various construction workflows including general field management tasks, safety and quality checklists, RFI’s, and commissioning.. This information can then be surfaced and viewed through the Project Home or Insight dashboards and which  can be customized to gain a high-level overview of projects, allowing users to quickly see trends and important information with an easy-to-understand visual representation of project data.

Taking the visualization a step further, teams can also leverage the powerful built-in BIM 360 reporting capabilities. The reporting functionality allows users to quickly pull the right pieces of information they need to run recurring reports as well as the ability to schedule and share these reports with other team members.

Construction Daily Reports in BIM 360

So, how do you utilize reporting within BIM 360? Reports in BIM 360 can be accessed from two angles. First, reports can be individually generated from within the respective workflow itself. For example, if you wanted to run an RFI summary I can go into the RFI tab within the Project Management module to generate this report.

Current reports within the modules include:

Field Management - Here you can run reports such as Individual Issues or Checklists, Issue Summary reports, and Checklist Summary reports (which includes issues created from a checklist, as well as photos related to issues. These reports can be leveraged on-site during safety inspections, commissioning, and other QA/QC processes).

Document Management - This module includes reports like Issue Summary, Issue Detail reports, and a Document Log report (this report contains the most recent version of each document in a folder, as well as associated versions, sets, and any other attributes).  

Project Management - Access reports such as an RFI Summary (contains information about questions, answers, status, person, or company the RFI is assigned to), Individual RFI Items, Individual Submittal Package Details, or Submittal Package Summary.

_{The reporting functionality allows users to quickly pull the right pieces of information they need to run recurring reports}

Running Reports Through BIM 360 Insight

In addition to running reports from within each workflow, reports are also available in a centralized view from in the BIM 360 Insight module. This new aggregated view allows BIM 360 users to more fully benefit from reporting capabilities and more easily incorporate them into their workflows. From within this tab, users will be able to view a historical repository of all of the reports generated from within various workflows as well as create, schedule, and share new reports.

Features for reports within Insight include:

Filtering and Sorting - With Insight’s filtering and sorting capabilities, you can filter reports by selecting given attributes, and can sort reports by attributes such as company, status, location and more.

Sharing - Share reports to specific users, specific roles, or entire companies, including external team members who are not BIM 360 users. Want to share a report with everyone at a given subcontractor? Select the company and everyone will receive the report. Only want to share it with a specific person, such as the subcontractor’s foreman? Just enter the receiver's email address.

Scheduling - With the scheduling feature, you can create a schedule to generate a report in a given time window, and then share it with any specified recipients. This includes ongoing, recurring reports. For instance, let’s say you want to see issues from the previous day. You could schedule this report to run at 8am every morning, and it will send an email to everyone subscribed to that report with a link to the report. This report will also appear on every recipients “Recent Reports” tab within Insight.

_{Users will be able to view a historical repository of all of the reports generated from within various workflows as well as create, schedule, and share new reports}

How Can You Benefit from Construction Daily Reports?

How can BIM 360 users benefit from these enhanced reporting capabilities in Insight? Reporting streamlines communication between project members and helps push information to the right team member of stakeholder. Compared to manually generating reports, automated scheduling saves time, allowing team members to quickly gain high-level visibility into projects or across a number of projects.

Reporting also drives transparency and makes team members more accountable. Let’s examine a potential use case, a project engineer who works for the General Contractor and is responsible for managing a project’s subcontractors. The engineer could schedule a daily report to list all open issues related to the subcontractors that are responsible for those issue, and then distribute that report to go directly to the subcontractors. They could create a report for all unresolved issues, or all issues related to a particular subcontractor, in order to quickly gain visibility, ensure accountability, and communicate with the appropriate project team members.

Reporting can also help BIM 360 customers assess the adoption of specific processes such quality, safety or commissioning for a specific project. Reporting can create a scorecard that allows users to see how a project is performing. For example, users can check how many quality inspections are being executed on a daily basis. Are some projects not performing inspections, or are they spiking closer to handoff? By gaining visibility into what’s actually happening on projects, teams can quickly see where improvements need to be made.

Finally, by having a centralized view of all project reports, users can more clearly see a track record of how projects are performing as well as stay organized. Rather than sending one off emails with PDF reports and then having to track down where reports were saved, teams can simply refer back to the Reports tab as their single source of truth.

By leveraging reporting, you can turn construction data into actionable insights in order to drive better project outcomes. Get started with BIM 360 Insight today.