Case study / Quality Management
Dalux: Extending Quality Management Reporting from Project to Portfolio
Background
Good project tooling. Limited portfolio visibility.
Dalux is one of the most widely used quality management platforms in UK construction — providing project teams with a practical environment for managing inspections, checklists, defects and tasks across the site. But for multiple leading tier 1 contractors, the challenge wasn't getting teams to use Dalux. It was getting management insight from it.
Dalux's native reporting works well at project level — surfacing defect counts, inspection status and task activity for the teams working within a single project. What it doesn't give you is a consistent, comparative view across a portfolio of projects: which projects have the highest defect rates, which work packages are generating the most quality issues, which subcontractors are underperforming against quality standards, and where patterns are emerging that need to be addressed at a business level rather than a project level.
No portfolio-level quality view
Project teams had good visibility within their own project, but leadership had no consistent way to see quality performance across the portfolio — defect volumes, inspection completion and outstanding items all had to be manually consolidated.
Work package insight not available natively
Dalux tracks quality at task and item level, but surfacing performance by work package — understanding which discrete scopes of work were generating the most defects or lagging on inspections — required a reporting layer that didn't exist out of the box.
Supply chain quality difficult to assess
Understanding how individual subcontractors were performing against quality standards across multiple projects — not just one — required analysis across projects that Dalux's native tools were not designed to support.
Trend analysis limited
Identifying whether quality performance was improving or deteriorating over time — and at what rate — was difficult without a reporting environment that could aggregate, compare and trend Dalux data across periods and projects.
What Dalux captures
Rich quality data. Underused for management insight.
Dalux captures a significant volume of quality data at project level — inspections, checklists, defects, tasks, observations and sign-off workflows. The reporting challenge is making that data work beyond the project.
Inspections
Completed, outstanding and overdue
Dalux tracks inspection completion across projects and work packages — but without a portfolio reporting layer, understanding completion rates by project, business unit or subcontractor requires manual effort.
Defects
Raised, resolved and outstanding
Every defect raised in Dalux carries metadata — who raised it, which work package it relates to, which subcontractor is responsible, its current status. The reporting layer makes this actionable at scale.
Checklists
Completion and conformance
Checklist data captures procedural quality compliance at work package and task level — a dimension that becomes significantly more valuable when aggregated across projects to identify systematic gaps.
The solution
A reporting layer that extends what Dalux already does
Rather than replacing Dalux's native reporting, Acumine built a Power BI reporting layer on top of it — designed to serve the audiences and questions that the platform itself doesn't address.
The solution integrates directly with Dalux via its API, extracting and structuring quality data across all projects into a governed reporting model. Project teams continue using Dalux as normal — the reporting layer sits above it, giving leadership, quality managers and business unit heads the portfolio-level visibility they need without any change to how project teams work.
01
Portfolio quality overview
A portfolio-level summary of quality performance across all active projects — defect volumes, inspection completion rates, outstanding items and trend indicators — giving leadership an at-a-glance view of where quality risk is building.
02
Project-level quality reporting
Drill-down into individual project performance — defects raised and closed over time, inspection completion by period, overdue items and quality trend analysis — giving project quality managers and project directors a more structured view than Dalux provides natively.
03
Work package analytics
Quality performance broken down by work package — identifying which discrete scopes of work are generating the highest defect rates, where inspection completion is lagging and which work packages present the greatest outstanding quality risk at any point in time.
04
Supply chain quality performance
Subcontractor quality analysis across projects — tracking defect volumes, resolution performance and inspection completion rates by supply chain member. Where a subcontractor is working across multiple projects, their performance can be assessed at a company level rather than in isolation on each project.
05
Trend and period analysis
Quality performance trends over time — whether defect rates are rising or falling, whether inspection completion is improving and how performance compares across periods. Designed to support monthly quality reviews and business unit oversight without manual data preparation.
06
Overdue item tracking
Visibility of overdue defect resolutions and outstanding inspections — surfacing items that have missed target dates and giving project and business unit teams a structured basis for chasing resolution before they become a handover or client risk.
Audience and access
The right quality data for every level
The reporting model is built around audience. Different users need different views of quality data — and providing everyone with everything creates noise rather than clarity.
Senior leadership
Business-wide quality oversight
Full portfolio visibility — quality performance across all projects and business units, with the ability to identify systemic patterns, emerging risk areas and supply chain quality trends across the business.
Business unit / regional teams
Portfolio view within their scope
Visibility scoped to their own portfolio of projects — enabling regional quality managers and business unit directors to monitor performance, compare projects and manage subcontractor quality without seeing data outside their remit.
Project teams
Project and work package detail
Reporting restricted to their assigned project — giving project quality managers the work package and subcontractor detail they need to manage day-to-day quality performance and prepare for inspections and handovers.
Outcomes
Quality insight that goes further than the platform
Portfolio visibility that didn't exist before
Leadership and business unit teams gained a consistent, timely view of quality performance across the portfolio — without relying on project teams to manually prepare and send reports. The portfolio overview is always current, always comparable and always available.
Work package insight driving earlier intervention
By surfacing quality performance at work package level, the reporting gave project teams and quality managers a more targeted basis for intervention — identifying where defect rates were highest and where inspection completion was at risk before issues escalated to handover stage.
Supply chain accountability improved
Subcontractor quality performance became visible across projects and comparable over time — giving commercial and quality teams a stronger basis for supply chain conversations, pre-qualification and engagement decisions.
Quality reporting project teams can act on
Project teams and quality managers gain clear, accessible visibility of their own inspection performance, work package completion and overdue items — without having to navigate Dalux project-by-project to piece together the picture. The reporting gives quality co-ordination meetings a stronger data foundation and makes it easier to direct inspection effort where it is most needed.
Technology
Dalux quality data structured for portfolio management in Power BI
The solution uses a Microsoft Fabric medallion lakehouse architecture to ingest and transform quality data from Dalux's API — structuring it through Bronze and Silver layers before surfacing portfolio, project and work package performance in Power BI. Project teams continue using Dalux as normal; the reporting layer gives leadership and business unit teams the view they've been missing.
Dalux quality 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 Dalux and want more from your quality data?
If your teams are using Dalux well but your leadership doesn't have the portfolio-level quality visibility they need, Acumine can build the reporting layer that bridges the gap.