Increasing Digitization Transforming the Construction Management Solutions Market, 2020

The construction management solution (CMS) market is crowded with numerous small and large vendors competing for customers and market share. Among the most important sources of competitive differentiation are the depth of a vendor’s product line strategy and the ability to address the needs of a variety of stakeholder groups involved in a construction project from start to finish.

Software use grows with company size: construction firms with annual revenue of between $1 million and $50 million have roughly 80% manual processes (spreadsheets, paper contracts, and long-term employees with good memories); conversely, more than 35% of construction firms with annual revenue of $50 million to $100 million have adopted CMS software, although many of those are point solutions with data integration and workflow issues.

Vendors typically provide only point solutions for project management, construction financials, quality and safety, or field productivity and focus on either a single stakeholder: an owner, general contractor, or specialty contractor. Few vendors have been able to provide solutions across the entire stakeholder ecosystem, let alone provide end-to-end solutions that integrate successfully with existing software widely used by their customers. Some large vendors have bought and consolidated point solutions into end-to-end solutions, but few have developed them that way from the start, much less grown their business organically. Migration from point solutions to platforms is driven by reporting, data flow, and integration needs. Some smaller vendors consider themselves enterprise resource planning solutions with integrated accounting for payroll.

More than 90% of general contractor businesses are private and/or family-owned. The move to the cloud is driven by generational influences as a younger demographic joins the family business and wants to update technology. Owners and specialty contractors are seeing the same phenomenon.

Construction management is a global business with widely differing project sizes requiring vendors to consider growth strategies across regions and construction types: residential, commercial, industrial, and/or infrastructure. Contract/documentation tracking for control management, risk mitigation, and legal recourse is critically important beyond tracking project progress.

In this project, market size has been derived from the bottom up from vendor subscriber and revenue metrics. Frost & Sullivan’s projections for CMS revenue in the 7 studied countries (the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Ireland) depend on the weighted averages of expected impacts of drivers and restraints through 2024.

Author: Robert Cavin