How Apogea Built Interactive Charts on Top of 3D Building Models

Company Profile: Apogea

$15.8 billion goes to waste every year in construction. The culprit? Pen, paper, and a local server full of unstructured spreadsheets. The construction industry is notoriously behind in digitalization, and technology consulting firm Apogea is on a mission to turn this around.

At the center of their story are BIM models. Think of it as a “digital blueprint” for any construction project. Just like a traditional blueprint contains detailed plans, measurements and specifications, a BIM model collects all of that information digitally, and presents it in a 3D model.

With their innovative software platform, Apogea is building a new standard for construction. They have built next-level interactive 3D models, controlled by Luzmo’s embedded analytics platform.

HQ

Malaga, Spain

Industry

PropTech, Civil Engineering, Consulting

Employees

25

Customer-facing reporting challenges

❌ Proving the impact of data in a less digitalized industry

❌ Customers need easy-to-use tools to make data-driven decisions

❌ Each customer has their own specific needs and data structures

Solution with embedded analytics

✔ Next-level interactive 3D models, powered by visual charts

✔ A unique selling point to help sell consultancy projects

✔ Competitive advantage with front-running innovation in the construction space

The challenge: making fragmented data insightful

As a consulting group, Apogea helps architecture, civil engineering and construction companies get a better grip on their data, so they can make better decisions during the entire construction process. Whether it’s design, construction or asset management.

For many of their clients, data and innovation are still in its infancy. Apogea’s challenge was to find a way to bring together all the data their customers have. They needed to connect two moving parts:

1. the 3D model of a construction project
2. contextual information about these construction projects, e.g. the materials used, construction costs, cashflow, sell price,…

Now imagine doing this for an entire portfolio of buildings, instead of a single construction project. Imagine all that information is scattered across different data sources… And as an extra barrier, many of their clients aren’t used to working with complex software tools.

Long story short, Apogea needed to turn something very complex into an extremely easy-to-use tool. Otherwise, they risk that customers won’t even use it.

“Our goal is to give our customers the possibility to link information that used to be in silos. By making that linked information available in a BI platform, powered by Luzmo, they can analyze not only information about a single construction project, but across their entire portfolio.”

- Jesús Valderrama, Founder & Executive Director at Apogea Consulting

The solution: charts that interact with 3D building models

To solve this challenge, Apogea has built a next-level visual tool for engineering & construction professionals, using three components.

1. A database to bring all that fragmented data together
2. A dashboard builder to turn raw data into interactive charts
3. 3D building models

Below is an example of what that looks like for Kronos, a residential project development company in Spain.

Inside this tool, Apogea’s customers can explore their data interactively and build their own dashboards with drag and drop. By using Luzmo's embedded dashboard editor, they were able to add an intuitive dashboarding tool directly inside the Apogea platform.

Project developers can build their own dashboards, which fully interact with the 3D models of their construction projects. For example, let’s say a project developer wants to see how many apartments are still available with a price range between $250k and $300k, less than 100 m2 in the region of Madrid. He can interactively filter that information on the Luzmo dashboard. As a result, the 3D model highlights only the apartments that meet these criteria.

“By using Luzmo, we can bring all this data from BIM models, CRM or ERP together in a visually understandable way. For one of our customers, Kronos, this tool is super useful during the sales process. They can immediately filter the dashboard on the characteristics their prospective buyers are looking for, and show the exact apartments that are available on the 3D model.”

- Jesús Valderrama, Founder & Executive Director at Apogea Consulting

A unique selling point to convince customers

In a sector with low digitalization, it’s not always easy to convince businesses of the impact of data. With this interactive visualization tool, Apogea now has an extra selling point at hand to convince new customers early on of the value data can have for their business.

“For us, it was really easy to implement Luzmo and integrate it into our software. But what’s even more powerful is how easy it is for our clients to use. It’s really intuitive to explore data, understand what’s happening, and change their strategy. And if some metrics are no longer relevant for our clients in 2 or 3 months, we can change the dashboards with little effort, and uncover new opportunities with them.”

- Agustí Jardí Margalef, Founder and Engineering Consultant at Apogea Consulting

Interested to learn more about adding interactive data visualization to your PropTech software? Get in touch with Luzmo's product experts for a live demo.