Microsoft Fabric for Construction: One Lakehouse for Every Project

A typical mid-size GC runs on five overlapping data systems that don't talk to each other. The ERP (Viewpoint, Sage, CMiC) holds the financial truth. Procore holds field data — daily reports, RFIs, submittals, photos. The scheduling system (Primavera, MS Project) holds the timeline. The safety platform holds incident and observation data. And various Excel spreadsheets hold the bid analysis, equipment utilization, and subcontractor evaluation data that lives in individual PM laptops. The CFO wants a view of portfolio risk. The safety director wants to correlate incidents with schedule pressure. The COO wants to know which PMs consistently finish jobs on margin. None of these questions can be answered without joining data across all five systems — and that join doesn't exist.

Microsoft Fabric in Azure is purpose-built for this consolidation. OneLake as the single store for all construction data. Data Factory ingesting from ERP via CDC, from Procore via API, from the scheduling system, from the safety platform. Lakehouses per domain (financial, field, schedule, safety) with gold-layer models that join across them. Power BI Direct Lake for dashboards that perform against the volume of photo and document data construction generates. The key is that the financial domain must reconcile to the controller's WIP schedule, and the master data (projects, subs, cost codes) must be aligned across sources before any analytics is trustworthy.