Case study / Design Management
Asite: Extending Design Management Reporting from Project to Portfolio
Background
Good project tooling. Limited portfolio visibility.
Asite is a widely used Common Data Environment for construction — providing project teams with a structured platform for document management, design workflows, RFIs, technical submittals and task management. But for leading tier 1 contractors, the challenge wasn't getting teams to use Asite. It was getting management insight from it.
Asite's native reporting works well at project level — giving document controllers and design managers visibility of status, workflows and outstanding items within a single project. What it doesn't provide is a consistent, aggregated view across a portfolio: which projects have the most documents awaiting review, which RFIs are approaching overdue, where task completion is lagging across the supply chain, and how document status is trending at a business level rather than a project level.
No portfolio-level document visibility
Leadership and design managers had no consistent view of document status, volume or review performance across the portfolio — understanding the picture required navigating individual projects in Asite or manually consolidating data.
Overdue monitoring difficult at scale
Tracking which documents, RFIs and tasks were approaching or past their due dates across multiple projects required significant manual effort — making it easy for overdue items to go unnoticed until they created a tangible risk to programme or design delivery.
Supply chain performance hard to assess
Understanding how design consultants and subcontractors were performing against submission deadlines and review turnaround times — across multiple projects, not just one — required cross-project analysis that Asite's native tools were not designed to provide.
Forms and tasks siloed within projects
RFI volumes, technical submittal status and task completion were tracked within individual projects with no aggregated view — making it difficult for regional or business-level management to identify patterns or emerging risk across the portfolio.
What Asite captures
Rich design management data. Underused beyond the project.
Asite captures a significant volume of design and document management data at project level — document status, review workflows, RFIs, technical and sample submittals, tasks and publishing records. The reporting challenge is making that data meaningful beyond the individual project.
Documents
Status and review pipeline
Every document in Asite moves through a defined status workflow — from Prepublished through QA, Design Review, Client Review and MCL Review to final status (Accepted, With Comments or Rejected). The reporting layer makes this visible at portfolio scale, with overdue tracking across each stage.
Forms
RFIs, submittals and correspondence
Asite manages structured form workflows — Requests for Information, Technical Submittals, Sample Submittals and other correspondence types. Status, overdue performance and resolution trends across these form types are aggregated and reported at portfolio level.
Tasks
Document and form tasks
Asite assigns tasks to organisations and individuals against documents and forms — tracking actions, review responsibilities and due dates. The reporting layer surfaces task completion and overdue status across projects and recipient organisations for management oversight.
The solution
A reporting layer that extends what Asite already does
Rather than replacing Asite's native reporting, Acumine built a Power BI reporting layer on top of it — using a Microsoft Fabric medallion lakehouse architecture to ingest, transform and structure Asite data for portfolio-level management reporting.
The solution integrates directly with Asite's API, extracting document, form and task data across all projects and structuring it through Bronze and Silver data layers into a governed reporting model. Project teams continue using Asite as normal — the reporting layer sits above it, giving design managers, commercial teams and leadership the cross-project visibility they need without any change to how project teams work.
01
Portfolio document status overview
A portfolio-level summary of document status across all active projects — volume by status stage, documents awaiting review at each stage, overdue items and status trends over time. Filterable by region, project, document type, originator and recipient organisation.
02
Overdue and due-soon monitoring
Documents, RFIs and tasks approaching or past their due dates surfaced prominently — categorised by days overdue and broken down by project and responsible party. Gives design managers and leadership earlier visibility of review bottlenecks and workflow delays before they affect programme.
03
Forms analytics by category
RFI, Technical Submittal and Sample Submittal performance reported separately — tracking open versus closed volumes, status distribution, overdue rates and resolution trends. Breakdowns by project allow comparison across the portfolio and support supply chain performance conversations.
04
Task tracking by organisation and individual
Document Tasks and Form Tasks tracked by recipient organisation and individual — surfacing which organisations have the largest outstanding task volumes, which are approaching or past due dates and where task completion performance is lagging across projects.
05
Design supply chain performance
Cross-project performance of design consultants and subcontractors — tracking submission timeliness, review turnaround, RFI volumes and document status against expectations. Where an organisation is active across multiple projects, performance can be assessed at a company level rather than in isolation on each project.
06
Task information and delivery planning
Visibility of planned, planned-and-issued and unplanned-and-issued document volumes against the information delivery plan — supporting document controllers and design managers in understanding the gap between what was planned and what has actually been published.
Access and governance
The right view for every audience
The reporting model is structured around audience — ensuring users see the level of detail appropriate to their role without being overwhelmed by data from projects outside their scope.
Senior leadership
Business-wide design management oversight
Full visibility across all projects, regions and business units — enabling leadership to monitor document review pipelines, identify overdue risk clusters and assess supply chain quality performance across the portfolio.
Regional and business unit teams
Portfolio view within their scope
Visibility scoped to their own portfolio of projects — giving regional design managers and business unit teams the oversight they need without exposing data from projects outside their remit.
Project teams
Project-level document and task detail
Reporting restricted to their assigned project — giving document controllers and project design managers detailed visibility of status, overdue items and task assignments for their own project.
Outcomes
Design management insight that goes further than the platform
Portfolio visibility that didn't exist before
Leadership and design managers gained a consistent, timely view of document status, overdue risk and review pipeline performance across the portfolio — without having to navigate individual projects in Asite or rely on manually produced reports.
Earlier identification of overdue risk
By surfacing documents, RFIs and tasks approaching their due dates at portfolio level, the reporting gave design managers and commercial teams earlier sight of review bottlenecks and workflow delays — enabling intervention before they became programme issues.
Supply chain performance made visible
Design consultant and subcontractor performance became visible across projects and comparable over time — giving design and commercial teams a stronger basis for supply chain conversations, review performance management and engagement decisions.
Design management reporting at project level too
Design managers and project teams gain accessible reporting on their own document status, approaching submissions and overdue RFIs without navigating Asite project-by-project to piece together the picture. The reporting provides a practical foundation for design co-ordination meetings and gives project teams earlier sight of their own submission risk — not just the portfolio-wide view available to leadership.
Technology
Asite data structured for portfolio management via Microsoft Fabric and Power BI
The solution uses a Microsoft Fabric medallion lakehouse architecture to ingest document, form and task data from Asite's API — transforming it through Bronze and Silver layers into a governed reporting model that surfaces portfolio, project and supply chain performance in Power BI. Project teams continue using Asite; the reporting layer provides the management view they have been missing.
Asite design management reporting has been delivered as part of Acumine's wider data and analytics work for multiple tier 1 contractors, including as part of the McLaren Construction Microsoft Fabric platform.
Work with Acumine
Using Asite and want more from your design management data?
If your teams are using Asite well but your leadership doesn't have the portfolio-level visibility they need, Acumine can build the reporting layer that closes the gap — extending Asite's value without changing how your project teams work.