Construction Project Performance Dashboard
Tuesday afternoon, third floor. The duct crew is ready to hang the corridor main, and the sprinkler main is already in the space it was drawn in. Somebody writes an RFI. The crew moves elsewhere and the answer comes back nine days later. By then the above-ceiling inspection has been pushed a week.
Delay is close to normal in this industry. In the AGC's 2026 workforce survey of 1,830 respondents, published in September 2026, only 26% reported no significant project delays. Worker shortages were the most common cause, cited by 42%, and owner directives to halt or redesign a project were cited by 28%. The work also stays dangerous. BLS counted 1,032 fatal injuries among construction and extraction workers in 2024, and construction's 2024 total recordable case rate was 2.2 per 100 full-time workers.
Planning reliability is the part a contractor controls. The Lean Construction Institute says that on average only 54% of the work planned for a given week is completed on schedule. The Last Planner System exists to raise that number, by making work ready before anyone promises it.
This example follows an invented commercial general contractor building two near-identical medical office buildings at the same time, one run with weekly look-ahead planning and one without. The company and both projects are made up, and every monthly figure is modeled. Most targets below are starting points, and the table says which ones have a published figure behind them.
What is a Construction KPI Dashboard?
Overview
A construction KPI dashboard tells a general contractor whether next week's work is ready to build, whether last month's work was built once, and what both mean for the handover date, the margin and the crews.
It starts with the plan. Percent plan complete (PPC) is the share of weekly commitments the foremen actually finished. RFI response time shows how long the design questions that block those commitments sit unanswered.
Then the work in place. Field rework cost is what it cost to tear out and redo installed work. First-time inspection pass rate is how often the inspector signs off on the first visit. Labor productivity factor compares the hours the estimate allowed for installed quantities with the hours the self-perform crews actually used.
Then the results the owner and the bonding company care about. The schedule performance index (SPI) and cost performance index (CPI) come from the cost-loaded schedule and the job cost ledger. Change orders as a share of contract value show how much the scope has moved underneath both. The total recordable incident rate (TRIR) sits beside all of it, because nothing wrecks a schedule like an injury on site.
Who benefits from this dashboard?
- Superintendent: PPC and its reasons for variance are the Monday conversation with the foremen. Inspection pass rate tells them which trade's work needs walking before the inspector arrives.
- Project Manager: Owns RFI response time and change orders, and has to explain SPI and CPI in the monthly owner meeting. Seeing PPC fall first buys them a month's warning.
- Operations VP: Compares jobs on identical measures. When one project drifts, they can tell whether the cause is the plan, the design or the crews before deciding what help to send.
- Safety Director: Reads TRIR next to site hours and labor productivity. Overtime and stacked trades show up in those two before they show up in the OSHA 300 log.
- Estimating: Labor productivity factor on finished jobs is the evidence for the next bid's labor units.
Count a PPC assignment as done only if it's 100% complete in the week it was promised, and only if the foreman who does the work made the promise. Partial credit and commitments written by the superintendent on the crew's behalf are the two usual ways a weak plan reports a strong score.
Dashboard Example Overview
The contractor is a regional commercial builder with about 220 staff in the Southeast. In October 2024 it started two four-story outpatient medical office buildings for the same health system: about 110,000 square feet each, same architect, same drawings, $52 million contracts, a $48.4 million cost budget each and a planned substantial completion date of September 30, 2026. Call them North and South. Both report the same nine KPIs monthly, tagged by project:
- Percent Plan Complete (PPC): Weekly work plan assignments finished as promised, divided by assignments committed. Both superintendents submit weekly commitments, so both jobs report it.
- Schedule Performance Index: Cumulative earned value divided by cumulative planned value, as PMI defines it. Below 1.0, less work is in place than the baseline planned.
- Cost Performance Index: Cumulative earned value divided by actual cost. Below 1.0, each dollar of planned work is costing more than a dollar.
- Change Orders % of Contract Value: Approved change orders to date divided by the original contract. Pending changes stay out until they're signed.
- RFI Response Time: Average calendar days from an RFI going out to its answer coming back, for RFIs answered in the month.
- Field Rework Cost: Labor, material and equipment spent redoing installed work, as a share of the month's direct cost. Owner-requested changes don't count; they're change orders.
- First-Time Inspection Pass Rate: Municipal, third-party and owner inspections passed at the first request, divided by inspections requested.
- Labor Productivity Factor: Earned hours for quantities installed divided by actual hours, on the contractor's self-performed concrete, carpentry and specialties. 1.0 means the crews are installing at the estimate.
- Total Recordable Incident Rate: OSHA recordable cases times 200,000, divided by all site hours worked, subcontractors included, project to date.
North's superintendent runs the Last Planner System: a six-week look-ahead, a constraint log reviewed every week, and a Monday meeting where each trade foreman commits to next week's work. South's superintendent has 30 years in the business. He runs the job from the master schedule and a two-week look-ahead he writes himself, and the foremen get their weekly list from him.
For the first seven months, South looked like the better job. In December 2024 its SPI was 1.03 against North's 0.95. North's labor productivity factor sat at 0.94 in October and December, because the pull-planning sessions and constraint reviews took foremen off the tools, while South's crews ran at 1.01 to 1.03. On SPI alone, North looked like the problem.
PPC said otherwise. North climbed from 58.3% in October 2024 to 76.5% in April 2025. South drifted from 60.0% to 57.1%. Structure is forgiving: steel, deck and slabs go in one after another, and a missed week shows up as a late week, not a pile-up. The SPI lines crossed in May 2025, with North at 1.00 and South at 0.99.
Then MEP rough-in started, with five trades sharing every ceiling. South's RFIs took 12.0 days to answer in June 2025 and 13.3 days in October. North's took 6.2 to 6.8 days, from the same architect. The difference was timing. North's constraint log flagged coordination questions three to five weeks before an area opened, each with a need-by date, and reviewed them on a weekly call with the design team. South's arrived marked urgent, from crews already standing at the clash.
Work that went in before the answer came back often came out again. South's field rework cost rose from 1.7% of direct cost in June 2025 to 2.7% in January 2026, and its first-time inspection pass rate fell to 79.1% in September 2025 and 78.3% in January, mostly on above-ceiling and in-wall inspections. North held rework at 0.6 to 0.9% and passed 92.7% of inspections first time in September. By November 2025 South's SPI was 0.88.
North had a bad stretch too, and planning didn't prevent it. In January 2026 the health system redesigned the imaging suite on North's second floor, and approved change orders jumped from 3.0% to 5.3% of contract value. In February North's PPC fell to 71.9%, SPI to 0.98 and rework rose to 1.3%, while RFIs on the new layout took 8.7 days. PPC was back to 81.5% by April and SPI to 1.00 by June. North still finished with more change orders than South, 6.4% against 4.8%. Look-ahead planning didn't stop the owner changing the building. It shortened how long the change hurt.
In March 2026 the company tried to buy South's time back with six-day weeks and a second drywall crew. SPI edged up from 0.89 in February to 0.91 in April, partly for the arithmetic reason below, but labor productivity dropped to 0.86 in April and CPI slid from 0.97 in January to 0.94 by July. Three of South's five recordable injuries came between March and June 2026, and its project-to-date TRIR went from 1.53 in February to 2.96 in June. It ended September at 2.72, against North's 1.16 on two recordables and the BLS 2024 rate of 1.9 for nonresidential building construction.
North reached substantial completion in the last week of September 2026 with SPI at 1.00 and CPI at 1.02. South's SPI now reads 0.96, which looks like a recovery and isn't: planned value stopped growing at the planned finish date, so SPI drifts back toward 1.0 on any late job. South has earned 95.7% of its budget, where the plan expected it to be in mid-July, so it's about 11 weeks behind and forecasting a December handover. At a CPI of 0.94, PMI's estimate at completion puts it about $3.1 million over its cost budget. Over the 24 months, North completed 78.7% of 4,594 weekly assignments. South completed 54.4% of 4,576, almost exactly LCI's average.
One more thing the split view shows. With both jobs combined, the board's SPI never fell below 0.93 (February 2026) and CPI never below 0.98. A portfolio-only board would have looked tolerable the whole way through.
Creating a Construction Project Dashboard in SimpleKPI
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Step 1 Settle what counts as a promise, an RFI day and a recordable
Does a PPC assignment get credit at 90% done? (It shouldn't.) Does the RFI clock start when the subcontractor asks or when the GC forwards it, and does it count calendar days or working days? Are subcontractor hours and cases in TRIR? Is a ceiling torn out for an owner change rework or a change order? Answer them differently on two jobs and the comparison is worthless.
The guide to choosing KPIs covers the general case.
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Step 2 Cost-load the schedule before you trust SPI
SPI and CPI are only as good as the baseline. Load the schedule with the cost budget at the start, freeze it, and re-baseline only when a change order is approved. Then name one source per KPI: the scheduler for planned and earned value, the job cost ledger for actual cost and the rework cost code, the RFI and inspection logs for those two, the weekly work plans for PPC, and the OSHA 300 log with site sign-in hours for TRIR.
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Step 3 Bring PPC to the Monday foremen meeting and SPI to the owner meeting
PPC, its reasons for variance and the open RFIs with need-by dates belong on the screen when the foremen commit to next week. Inspection pass rate and rework by trade belong in the weekly quality walk. SPI, CPI and change orders belong in the monthly cost review and the owner meeting. TRIR goes on every view, with site hours beside it.
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Step 4 Read acceleration in three numbers, not one
When a late job adds overtime or a second crew, SPI is supposed to improve. Check labor productivity factor and TRIR the same month. If productivity falls and recordables rise while SPI barely moves, the job is buying very little schedule at a high price, and the fix is upstream in the plan, not on the timesheet.
List of Construction Project KPIs
Only TRIR has a published US rate to compare against, while PPC and RFI response time have research figures that give context. SPI and CPI targets come from their definitions. The rest are this example's starting points, to be replaced with your own once a few jobs have closed out.
| KPI Name | Typical Target | Description | Calculation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Percent Plan Complete (PPC) | ≥ 80% (starting point); LCI average 54% | How reliable the weekly plan is. Falls before the schedule does. | Assignments completed 100% as promised divided by assignments committed. |
| Schedule Performance Index | ≥ 1.00 (PMI: 1.0 = on pace) | Work in place against the baseline. Unreliable near the end of a late job. | Cumulative earned value divided by cumulative planned value. |
| Cost Performance Index | ≥ 1.00 (PMI: 1.0 = on budget) | Cost efficiency of the work in place. Budget divided by CPI estimates the final cost. | Cumulative earned value divided by cumulative actual cost. |
| Change Orders % of Contract Value | ≤ 5% (starting point) | How far the scope has moved. Mostly owner-driven, so read it as disruption, not as a crew score. | Approved change order value to date divided by original contract value. |
| RFI Response Time | ≤ 7 days (starting point); Navigant 2013 median 9.7 | How long design questions block the work. | Calendar days from RFI submitted to answer received, averaged over RFIs answered in the month. |
| Field Rework Cost | ≤ 1.0% (starting point) | Money spent building the same thing twice. Usually under-recorded. | Cost of tearing out and redoing installed work divided by direct cost incurred. |
| First-Time Inspection Pass Rate | ≥ 90% (starting point) | Quality at the point of inspection. A failed inspection costs a re-book as well as the fix. | Inspections passed at the first request divided by inspections requested. |
| Labor Productivity Factor | ≥ 1.00 (starting point) | Whether self-perform crews are installing at the estimate. | Earned hours for installed quantities divided by actual hours. |
| Total Recordable Incident Rate | ≤ 1.5 (starting point); BLS 2024: 2.2 construction, 1.9 nonresidential building | Recordable injuries and illnesses per 100 full-time workers. | OSHA recordable cases x 200,000 divided by site hours worked, subcontractors included. |
Why Construction Dashboards Matter
On a building site, the numbers that look best on a monthly report are the easiest to buy at the expense of the others. SPI can be propped up with overtime, which shows up later in labor productivity and TRIR. CPI can look healthy for months while rework sits buried in the drywall and mechanical cost codes.
The leading measures pull against the lagging ones in time, not just in direction. North paid for its look-ahead planning in the first months, with a lower SPI and productivity factor than South, and got the return in the second year. A board that showed only SPI and CPI would have scored that trade as a mistake for seven months.
Change orders are the honest exception. They mostly belong to the owner, and on this pair the better-run job ended up with more of them. What a contractor controls is how quickly a change gets planned into the look-ahead, which shows in PPC and RFI response time, not in the change order line itself.
If you run two or more jobs, split every KPI by project and look at PPC before SPI. A superintendent whose weekly plan keeps landing in the 50s during the structural phase is telling you what the MEP phase will look like, months before the cost report does.
For the design side of a building project, see the engineering project management dashboard example and the architect dashboard example.
Building it in SimpleKPI
Build this dashboard yourself with SimpleKPI's KPI dashboards, or start from the Construction KPIs template. The mechanics are the same whatever you track:
- KPIs: each one gets a target, an entry frequency and tags, so you can report by team, site, product or whatever you split the numbers by.
- Data: type numbers in, import a spreadsheet, or use an integration or the API. The dashboard updates as each number lands, so daily and monthly KPIs sit side by side.
- Reports: scheduled KPI reports email the numbers to people who never log in.
- AI: Kip, the built-in AI, suggests targets and flags indicative benchmarks (AI estimates, not peer data) once some history builds up.
- Price: $79 a month for unlimited users and KPIs, as one flat price, with a 14-day free trial and no card needed.