Bad data is a line item: what poor information costs construction

Poor project data and miscommunication drove 48% of rework in US construction, and bad decisions from bad data cost an estimated $88.7 billion globally in 2020. The fix is not glamorous: one source of truth.

Rework sounds like a site problem: a wall poured wrong, a pipe in the wrong shaft. But a large share of it starts in the office, in the information people used to make the call. The Autodesk and FMI study on construction data puts numbers on it: poor project data and miscommunication were responsible for 48% of all rework in the United States. Globally, rework represented about 5% of all construction spending in 2020, roughly $625 billion, and bad decisions caused by bad data accounted for an estimated $88.69 billion of that.

What bad data looks like in a construction company

• Two people with two different availability counts for the same project, both confident.
• A price list from last year used to quote this month's work.
• An installment marked paid in one file and overdue in another.
• A buyer's change request living in a salesperson's chat history.

None of these look like rework. They look like ordinary Tuesdays. The rework arrives later, when someone acts on the wrong number.

The uncomfortable part

The same study found that only 36% of companies had implemented a process to identify and repair bad data, and that one in three poor decisions resulted from it. This is not a technology gap. It is a discipline gap: the information exists, scattered across files and chats, and nobody owns making it agree with itself.

One source of truth is a decision, not a purchase

The fix starts with a rule: each fact lives in exactly one place, and every report, invoice and decision reads from it. A system enforces that rule far better than a folder of spreadsheets ever will, which is the entire point of a CRM built for construction companies. But the decision comes first. Software only makes it stick.