Top 3 Trends in the Architecture and Engineering Space

Thriving in today’s architecture and engineering space means balancing costs, careful project management, and leveraging data for maximum efficiency. Even as the economic tides continue to shift, architecture and engineering firms must confidently take the wheel to navigate the changes that rock the industry.

As inflation continues to impact major projects while contract values decline, keeping a strong reporting posture and analytical practices allow businesses to maintain agility and understand where to prioritize increasingly limited resources.

What will make the biggest splash on finance teams in the architecture and engineering firms through the second half of 2024 and beyond? Here, we list the top three trends impacting these industries.

1. Balancing Labor Costs With Project Value

After market upheaval and skills shortages defined 2022 and 2023, architecture and engineering firms continue to navigate an uncertain market. According to the Deltek Clarity Architecture and Engineering Study, labor costs are on the rise. Although the Deltek study reveals an 86% increase in awarded contracts, proposal value has plummeted 40% year over year.

How can finance teams in these sectors keep up?

Focusing on efficiency can help architecture and engineering companies balance rising labor costs and decreased proposal value with the revenue gained with a greater quantity of contracts. An investment in automation technology can help by streamlining reporting and project management while achieving significant time savings for month-end reporting.

2. The Rise of Artificial Intelligence

The past year has seen an explosion in artificial intelligence (AI) usage across all industries. In the architecture and engineering space, AI opens up a variety of new opportunities from streamlining project management processes to finding additional insights in project data.

For architects and engineers, predictive maintenance is an especially valuable facet of AI. By using an algorithm to monitor infrastructure conditions, the system can predict potential maintenance needs before they become urgent. This reduces downtime, protects safety, and reduces the cost of emergency repairs.

For finance teams in architecture and engineering, AI can be used to gain insights from tracking project timelines and managing budgets. It can also help automate repetitive tasks such as data entry. When finance teams aren’t bogged down by manual data exports and the QA processes they require, they can close the books faster while freeing up more time for analysis.

And if you’re looking to leverage the power of AI to manage customer relationships, Deltek Vantagepoint uses AI to summarize client information, giving teams a bird’s-eye view of client interactions and status. With more efficient client relationship monitoring, your team can improve client relationships and potentially gain more projects.

3. Process Optimization

Project-based industries like engineering and architecture have very specific reporting needs, making it vital to keep projects progressing while adhering to tight deadlines for period-end close. But if you still report manually, it can send your progress to a grinding halt.

According to insightsoftware and Hanover Research’s recent Report on Operational Reporting, 98% of organizations surveyed distribute reports via a static PDF while 95% generate either all or mostly static reports. This means stakeholders don’t have access to real-time or refreshable data to delve deeper and make the critical on-the-fly decisions that drive projects forward. Furthermore, inputting and exporting data manually into a spreadsheet can also lead to inaccuracies that are hard to find without careful review.

Process automation can optimize operational and financial reporting while eliminating manual errors and keeping reports up to date. With the help of automation technology and predictive analytics, you can achieve more accurate reporting and greater efficiency at critical operational tasks like managing project budgets and timelines.

Technology to Keep Up With Emerging Trends

When you grapple with balancing tight project deadlines alongside critical month and quarter-end close, efficiency is key. By optimizing processes with an automated reporting solution, you can shorten reporting cycles while achieving more up-to-date, accurate reporting.

Spreadsheet Server from insightsoftware is a financial and operational reporting solution equipped with intuitive functionality to fit all your architecture and engineering industry reporting needs. It provides fast, real-time access to the Deltek ERP data you need and without the need to lean on your IT department for custom and ad hoc reports. At the click of a button, instantly generate up-to-date reports that remove the risk for errors that can be costly in project reporting.

With Spreadsheet Server, you can:

Gain More Insights From Data with self-service project reports like status reports, budget variance reports, risk assessments, and more.

Shrink Reporting Cycles with automated financial, operational, and even custom project reports that take minutes instead of weeks to generate, leaving you with more time for critical analysis.

Integrate Directly With Deltek ERPs for a single source of truth with trustworthy, error-free data.

Automate Report Distribution with Spreadsheet Server’s Distribution Manager, which automates report saving and sending to any recipient.

Ready to learn more? Watch our on-demand webinar about how to reimagine automated project financials in the engineering, architecture, and construction space.