The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly made it more challenging for construction companies to plan and adjust to.
Since the beginning of the year, construction starts are down 15% compared to the same 7 months from 2019.
Looking at construction sectors, the declines were:
- Total starts down 15% through July compared to last year
- Nonresidential construction starts are down 25% through July compared to last year
- Non-building starts are down 20% through July compared to last year
- Construction starts for highway & bridge projects were down 25% in July
Having the ability to analyze the entire sales pipeline and current projects during these uncertain times will help determine strategies going forward.
Variances and Time Intelligence
Over the past few weeks I’ve been learning from some of the best in the Power BI industry.
From watching a Zebra BI video on the 7 worst Power BI mistakes, to spending 6 hours on a Thursday learning from experts during the Northwest Power BI Days meeting, there is a great community out there.
One of the best things I learned was watching Alex Powers teach an introduction on how to use Tabular Editor, an external tool where you can write scripts that will save you a lot of time (e.g., writing time intelligence measures for multiple measures).
Using a time intelligence script created by the Power BI community, I was able to deploy these common measures:
- Prior Year
- Year-over-Year
- Year-over-Year (%)
- Month-to-Date
- Year-to-Date
- Quarter-to-Date
These 6 measures were executed against my sums (total units, total days, total project value, total square feet) and resulted in over 40 time intelligence measures.
It was one-click and 40 new measures were created in my model. No need to copy and paste, change column names, change table names, and then repeat the same process 40 times.
These time intelligence measures allowed me to analyze current construction projects based on:
- Total Unit started this year vs. the same period last year
- Value/Gross SF this year vs. the same period last year
View the dashboard in a new tab with this link: Construction Sales Dashboard