Your Programme Says You’re on Track. But Are You Really?
Most programme slippage doesn’t announce itself. It builds quietly, hidden in optimistic reporting, frozen progress bars, and data that nobody questions. By the time it shows up in a report, it has usually been accumulating for weeks. The good news is that it doesn’t have to.
This is the problem that Acumine’s Build Intelligence platform, when integrated with Asta Vision, is designed to solve.
The Difference Between Drift And Slippage
Understanding why projects overrun starts with a distinction that often gets missed. Drift and slippage are not the same thing.
Drift is the slow, incremental divergence from the baseline that builds over time. No single event causes it and it might occur in discreet parts of the project or programme that aren’t currently a priority. It often happens when progress is consistently overestimated by a small margin, when assumptions quietly shift, or when teams lose sight of what is actually inside the bar on a Gantt chart. Programmes are built on quantities and assumptions, but over time, those details get forgotten. Teams report on opinion rather than measurement, and optimism bias does the rest.
Slippage, or delay, is the measurable consequence of drift on the completion of a project. Essentially, it is the gap between when you originally planned to finish and when you are now forecasting to finish by. The challenge is that by the time slippage is visible in a report, drift has usually been happening for weeks.
Catch or prevent the drift, and you stop the slippage. That is the core of the Acumine proposition.
How Acumine’s Build Intelligence solution works with Asta
Our Build Intelligence solution integrates with Asta Vision by transforming programme data into fully interactive dashboards. There is no manual export, no spreadsheet consolidation, and no version control problem. Every stakeholder, from site manager to board director, sees the same picture at the same time.
Critically, this is not a replacement for Asta. Rather it is an intelligence layer built on top of it. The core planning data remains within the Vision platform.
Acumine transforms that data into portfolio-wide visibility: S-curves showing planned versus actual durations, schedule health scorecards aligned to the CIOB planning protocol, critical path tracking, milestone variance and resource distribution, all updated automatically and all in one place.
As Brendan Johnston, Planning Director at McLaren Construction Group, put it during the joint Eleco and Acumine webinar: people need to trust the data they’re getting — or question it — as it happens, not months later when they’ve already got a problem. Acumine’s Build Intelligence solution enables that by delivering programme insights directly to project teams so that they can take fast and effective action.
From Rear-View Mirror Monitoring to Active Project Controls
The shift that contractors describe when they move to programme insights from Acumine is not just a reporting improvement, it is a change in how decisions get made.
Problems are caught and corrected before they escalate. Commercial and programme teams finally work from the same data. Executive Boards and clients receive consistent, credible updates rather than manually compiled snapshots that may already be out of date by the time they are presented.
That breadth of impact across an organisation is what separates a reporting tool from a genuine intelligence platform.
Neil Tugwell, Regional Head of Planning at Willmott Dixon, describes it simply: Acumine has given his teams a new depth of insight that was never immediately visible when looking at a Gantt chart — from junior site managers through to directors.
The Right Fit For Where You Are Now
Build Intelligence provides a fully hosted, turnkey reporting solution with pre-built dashboards for Asta, requiring no in-house technical expertise. Our support team don’t drop and run but act as your own in-house experts, supporting you when required.
You do not need to be data-mature to start. In fact, beginning with Build Intelligence early helps to uncover where wider improvements may be required faster. The act of connecting your Asta Vision data to a live dashboard is often the moment teams realise what they have been missing.
“Recently we’ve been implementing and rolling out our new Planning Report. Developed in partnership with Acumine, this has been a game-changer for our business so far. We now have an automated reporting solution, where the planning team simply pushes their data from their planning software into our server and the dashboard seamlessly transforms it into clear, accessible performance insights for the entire project portfolio. All key project KPIs are presented in near real time, giving every stakeholder immediate visibility into project performance.”
Steven Williams, Regional Head of Planning, North – SES Ltd
