ConstructivIQ, an artificial intelligence-driven integrated procurement, planning and material tracking software tool, has been deployed enterprise-wide by contractor DPR Construction since early February.

The three-year-old startup is a graduate of WND Ventures, the contractor’s in-house venture capital arm. ConstructivIQ integrates all submittal and material workflows into one platform, such as connecting a user’s estimation spreadsheets with data from an ERP system, a common procurement problem.

“Across every business unit, there was something about procurement that, when we digested it, it was really related to how project engineers go through and identify data that either exists in a drawing or a specification or something else you try to make sense of from a procurement point of view,” says Atul Khanzode, chief technology officer at DPR. “You have all these steps you need to go through, such as availability of material that includes shop drawings, and sometimes there are lead times on approvals.”

Procurement Lifecycle

By integrating all procurement workflows, such as buyout, submittal and materials, with a project master schedule, the tool allows DPR and its subcontractors to plan and manage a procurement. “Last year was the year of getting our product out and really working with early adopter customers such as DPR,” says Sadanand Sahasrabudhe, ConstructivIQ CEO, who had 30 years experience in software development before co-founding the company, which was his third startup.

Larger projects that are already using ContructivIQ include an $800-million Meta data center and the $700-million renovation of the Penn State University football stadium in State College, Pa.

Rather than dealing with siloed data in spreadsheets and submittals and delivery schedules never interacting, the ConstructivIQ platform brings all activities related to procurement onto one critical path. With information from spreadsheets, “you get relevant data from many different silos, such as project management data from Procore orAutodesk—it’s a manual exercise,” Sahasrabudhe says.

Dashboard View

In its dashboard view, ConstructivIQ highlights, in green, tasks that crews are working on and in red, those that a contractor plans to address in the future—offering an overall vision of the end-to-end lifecycle of procurement.

Data can be pulled into ConstructivIQ from Excel spreadsheets or popular estimating tools, and a schedule can be built from scratch or imported from Primavera P6, a key feature, given its popularity, Sahasrabudhe says. Data from project management software can be imported via open application program interfaces.

The system enables users “to build all the submittals, but not just within the system,” Khanzode says. “It can also import data from either Procore or Autodesk Construction Cloud ... so they don’t need to do it twice. Then they can do the same thing with Primavera, where we bring it in with the XER file.”

ConstructivIQ’s AI agent is still being worked on but it can already assist project managers with recommendations. “The goal is to use AI to tell the rookie project engineer when we see the data available ‘you may have a situation here where you have to do field measurement,’” Sahasrabudhe says. “But [users] may not realize [they’re] dependent on a schedule activity, and have to plan for it. There’s so many materials to track and so much complexity, they may miss things.”