Construction data silos: how to get one answer from many systems
By the Junction team · Published 24 October 2026 · 4 min read
The short answer
- A contractor's data lives in several systems: accounting for cost, a scheduler for activities, a project platform for RFIs and issues. The interesting questions cut across them.
- You can answer them by querying each system where it lives and joining the results on a shared key, usually the job or project number, instead of copying everything into one warehouse first.
- The hard part is not the technology but agreeing what counts as the same job in each system, and who may see the combined answer.
Ask a project executive which jobs are in trouble and you will get an answer assembled by hand from three or four places: cost to date from the accounting system, a forecast from the schedule, open RFIs and issues from the project platform, a pay application status from the payments tool. Each is accurate on its own. Putting them together takes someone a day.
Why the silos exist
Each system was bought to solve one problem by a different team. Accounting owns cost. Project managers own the schedule and the documents. Estimators have their own tool. Owners run capital-program software on their side. They were never designed to share a vocabulary, and the same project can be "1042" in one, "Riverside Medical Office" in another and a code like "RMO-01" in a third.
The Autodesk and FMI study of more than 3,900 professionals defined "bad data" as information that is inaccurate, incomplete, inaccessible, inconsistent or untimely, and estimated it may have cost the industry $1.85 trillion in 2020. Silos produce three of those five at once: data is hard to reach, inconsistent between systems and often out of date by the time it is combined.
Three ways to join systems
| Approach | Best for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| Build a warehouse | Company-wide reporting where you have data engineers | Months before the first answer; a second copy of everything to secure and keep current |
| Export and merge by hand | A one-off question | Stale the moment it is made; errors in copy and paste; sensitive files left in inboxes |
| Query each system in place and join the answers | Questions people ask on the day, across a handful of systems | Needs a safe connection to each system and an agreed match between records |
The match is the real work
To combine records, the systems must agree what is the same thing. Three tactics, in order of effort:
- Use a shared job number wherever teams already enter it in each system. It is the cheapest and most reliable key.
- Keep a crosswalk. A short table that says job 1042 in accounting is project "Riverside Medical Office" in the project platform and RMO-01 in the scheduler. An administrator confirms it once.
- Suggest matches, then confirm them. Names that are nearly identical can be proposed automatically by simple string comparison, but a person should approve each link, because a wrong match produces a confident, wrong answer.
Cross-system questions worth asking
Examples
- Which projects have open change orders in the project platform but no matching cost in accounting yet?
- Which jobs are over budget on cost and also behind on the schedule?
- Which subcontractors have overdue RFIs on one job and unpaid invoices on another?
- Which capital projects show a forecast above their approved budget and invoices waiting for approval?
Guardrails when you combine systems
- Apply the strictest rule. If a person may not see payroll in accounting, a combined answer must not reveal it through the other system either.
- Show the source of each figure so a reader knows which system supplied it and how fresh it is.
- Read each system through a login that can only read, so combining data cannot change any of it.
Junction is built for this: one connection to many systems, with the match between records kept as data an administrator controls. The list of systems shows what it connects to or plans to, including Primavera P6, Aconex and Fieldwire in the next wave. Cross-system answers need each system connected and validated for your company, and are part of the roadmap rather than something every customer has today.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a data silo in construction?
- A data silo is information held in one system that other systems and teams cannot easily reach, such as job cost in accounting, schedules in a scheduling tool and RFIs in a project platform. It makes questions that span them slow to answer.
- Do I need a data warehouse to combine construction systems?
- Not for every question. A warehouse suits company-wide reporting. For questions people ask on the day, querying each system in place and joining the results on a shared job number is faster to start, as long as the connections are secure and the matches are agreed.
- How do I match the same project across different systems?
- Use a shared job or project number where one exists. Otherwise keep a crosswalk table that an administrator confirms, and treat automatic name matching as a suggestion to approve, not a decision.
Sources
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