The construction industry has a $1.8 trillion problem hiding in plain sight. According to the 2025 State of Workforce Planning report, 93% of construction leaders say labor shortages are impacting their operations, yet most are still trying to solve this crisis with disconnected spreadsheets and siloed systems that make the problem worse.

When Malia Ahmed, Lead Business Analyst at Atkins Realis, discovered her company was forecasting 30 civil engineers for a project that only needed 18, it was just the tip of the iceberg. The real shock came when she realized this wasn’t an isolated incident. It was a systemic issue caused by a timesheet solution that wasn’t talking to their Bridgit workforce planning tool. No common data fields. No way to connect forecasting with reality.

This is the hidden cost of data silos in construction, and it’s draining profitability from even the most successful firms. But as Malia and other forward-thinking construction leaders are discovering, the journey from reactive, spreadsheet-based workforce planning to proactive, integrated workforce planning can transform these hidden costs into competitive advantages.

The spreadsheet trap: When yesterday’s solution becomes today’s problem

The numbers tell a sobering story. According to Gartner research, businesses lose an average of $15 million annually due to poor quality data, with some companies seeing up to 30% revenue loss from data silos. In construction specifically, these disconnected systems contributed to $88 billion in avoidable rework in 2020 alone.

Yet despite these staggering costs, the problem persists. Bridgit’s 2025 State of Workforce Planning report reveals that 71% of construction leaders still use Microsoft Excel alongside their workforce planning software, creating exactly the kind of fragmented data environment that costs billions. The result? Construction professionals spend up to 50% of their time wrestling with disconnected data instead of building.

Stephen Barnett, Senior Business Analyst at Sitzler, knows this challenge intimately. When he joined the company six months ago, he inherited a workforce planning “system” that consisted of one person managing spreadsheets for 250 staff members across multiple remote Australian office locations.

“It was a single point of failure,” Stephen reflects. “We had projects scattered across the country, in quite diverse and remote locations, and getting that single source of truth and line of sight across the entire business was quite a challenge.”

The complexity multiplies when you consider that labor costs typically represent 30-50% of total project costs. When your workforce planning is trapped in silos, you’re essentially flying blind with half your budget.

The anatomy of failure: How disconnected systems create cascading costs

The true cost of data silos extends far beyond the time wasted on manual updates. It creates a cascade of inefficiencies that touch every aspect of construction operations, particularly when it comes to building high-performing teams. The 2025 State of Workforce Planning report also found that 100% of construction leaders agree that “a project team’s collective experience is significant in creating successful outcomes,” yet disconnected systems make it nearly impossible to track and leverage that experience.

At Atkins Realis, the challenge was even more complex. As a nuclear engineering consulting firm, they bill clients by the hour, with engineers charging time to potentially millions of different project codes. Meanwhile, their workforce planning system tracked allocations by percentage.

“None of the data that we bring in from our actual charges speak to anything that is put into Bridgit,” Malia explains. “There are no common fields. Not even one data point is similar.”

This disconnect created a perfect storm of problems:

• Project managers couldn’t see where their people were actually working
• Functional managers with 80+ direct reports had no real-time visibility into utilization
• The company was making hiring decisions based on forecasts that bore no resemblance to reality
• Overtime patterns went undetected, leading to burnout and safety risks

The industry-wide impact is staggering. Over 70% of construction projects run over schedule, with large projects typically exceeding budgets by 80%. Much of this stems from the workforce planning failures that disconnected systems enable.

Breaking through blockades: The integration journey

The path to clarity isn’t always straightforward, but the rewards can be transformative. Both Malia and Stephen’s organizations discovered that breaking free from data silos required more than just new software—it demanded a fundamental rethinking of how they organized and connected their data.

For Malia, the breakthrough came through an insight that seems obvious in hindsight but required months of analysis to uncover. “We had to literally look at every field that you possibly have on the left side and every possible field you have on the right side and figure out just the one commonality,” she explains.

The solution? Creating a grouping methodology that consolidated millions of project charge codes into 40 manageable buckets. By categorizing work by type and client, they built a bridge between their percentage-based workforce system and their hours-based billing system.

Stephen’s team at Sitzler took a different but equally strategic approach. They started by simplifying their project roles, discovering they had several titles that essentially meant the same thing. “We rationalized that right down so you have a very controlled, refined, consistent and common project roles appearing across all the schedules,” he notes.

The transformation was immediate and profound. What once took hours now took minutes. Stephen demonstrated this during their end-of-financial-year planning: “I was able to present a snapshot of the entire lifecycle and all of the costs, all of the roles, and all of the resource numbers from end to end on a monthly basis broken down by role. That was quite powerful. We’ve never really seen that before.”

The ROI reality: From cost center to profit driver

The business case for integrated workforce planning isn’t theoretical. The numbers speak for themselves: 99% of construction leaders plan to invest at least $100,000 in workforce planning technology in the next 12 months, according to Bridgit’s 2025 State of Workforce Planning report. Why? Because construction management software implementations typically show 400% ROI, with companies reporting up to 6% gains to their margins from workforce management platforms.

But the real value extends beyond the obvious time savings. When Atkins Realis connected their forecasting to actual timesheet data, they discovered:

• Projects consistently overstaffed by as much as 40% in certain roles
• Hidden overtime patterns that were driving costs and risking safety
• Opportunities to avoid unnecessary external hiring by reallocating internal resources
• The ability to course-correct in real-time rather than discovering problems months later

“It has tremendously helped solve how we can course correct along the way,” Malia shares. “Sure, forecasting is amazing, but it’s only a guess of what’s happening. You need to be able to always check to see if you’re even in the right direction.”

For Sitzler, the integration with their HR system through APIs has automated what was once a manual nightmare. New hires are automatically onboarded into the workforce planning system with all relevant data populated. Departing employees are flagged in advance, giving project managers time to plan transitions. The system even tracks employee project preferences, helping match people to work they’re passionate about.

Building your integration roadmap

The journey from siloed to integrated workforce planning doesn’t happen overnight, but it doesn’t have to take years either. The 2025 State of Workforce Planning report reveals what construction leaders are prioritizing: 45% want automation and AI features, 43% need better forecasting and analytics, and 43% require stronger integration capabilities. Based on the experiences of successful implementations, here’s your roadmap:

1. Start with data rationalization
Before connecting systems, clean your data. Stephen’s team eliminated 90 redundant role titles. Malia’s team created logical groupings for project codes. This foundational work makes everything else possible.

2. Identify your common thread
Every integration needs at least one common field. It might not exist in your current systems. You may need to create it. The key is finding or building that bridge between different data structures.

3. Phase your rollout
Stephen emphasizes the importance of customized training by permission group. “We targeted those groups with specific training that meant something to them,” he notes. Record these sessions. They become invaluable onboarding resources.

4. Leverage APIs for automation
Modern workforce planning platforms offer APIs that can transform manual processes. Sitzler’s HR integration saves countless hours while ensuring data accuracy. “The data point over in that system is now the data point over in Bridgit,” Stephen explains.

5. Plan for change management
“Just being resilient and consistent and sticking to it. Once the value of the tool and the information you start getting out, the journey becomes a lot easier,” Stephen advises. The key is involving senior staff early and demonstrating quick wins.

The future is connected

As the construction industry faces a need to attract 501,000 additional workers in 2024 beyond normal hiring, the companies that have integrated their workforce planning systems will have a decisive advantage. The urgency is clear: 75% of construction leaders believe workforce planning software can effectively address labor shortage issues, and 98% intend to invest in workforce planning solutions in the next 12 months.

They’ll know exactly where to deploy new hires, which projects need support, and where they can optimize existing resources.

The contrast is stark. While 72% of companies still lack basic data standards for their spreadsheets, forward-thinking firms are using integrated systems to:

• Predict hiring needs months in advance
• Identify and prevent burnout through overtime tracking
• Match employees to projects based on skills and preferences
• Provide real-time visibility from preconstruction through project completion

Malia puts it simply: “Bridgit forced us to think more simplistically in terms of our resourcing. You can always complicate things, you can always have an exception to every rule that exists. But everything can be simplified only if you think of it that way.”

The bottom line

The $1.8 trillion problem hiding in construction’s spreadsheets isn’t going away on its own. But as these real-world transformations show, the solution isn’t just about technology. It’s about reimagining how we connect our data to tell the true story of our workforce.

The companies still managing workforce planning through disconnected spreadsheets and siloed systems aren’t just wasting time and money. They’re missing the opportunity to transform their largest cost center into a strategic advantage. With 98% of construction leaders planning to invest in workforce planning solutions, according to Bridgit’s 2025 State of Workforce Planning report, the industry is at a tipping point.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to integrate your workforce planning systems. In today’s competitive construction market, the question is whether you can afford not to. The tools exist. The ROI is proven. The only thing standing between you and predictive, profitable workforce planning is the decision to begin.

As Stephen discovered when he consolidated Sitzler’s entire project lifecycle analysis in just 30 minutes: “That’s kind of the start of the journey… I don’t see it as we’ve delivered, we’re done, we can move on. I think there will be ongoing assessment as to how we could add further value.”

The hidden costs of data silos are real, but so is the opportunity to transform them into competitive advantage. The only question is: When will you start your journey?