Construction Software Evolution for Inter-Company Digital Workflows: Connecting Project Partners Across the Building Process

Construction projects depend on a web of relationships between owners, general contractors, subcontractors, architects, engineers, and material suppliers. More than in most industries, construction contractors rely on external partners to deliver value on every project. This interdependence makes coordination, collaboration, alignment, and visibility essential to on-time delivery and project quality. As firms adopt construction estimating software digital takeoff cost databases bim and other digital tools, the next frontier lies in connecting these systems across company boundaries. Inter-company digital workflows represent a significant shift in how project partners share information, process changes, and maintain alignment from groundbreaking through closeout.

The Inter-Company Digital Workflow Challenge in Construction

Why Construction Lags Behind Other Industries

Manufacturing and other project-based industries have made significant strides in connecting supply chain collaborators through standardized digital tools. Electronic digital interchange (EDI) has become common in manufacturing, supported by standards such as the United Nations/Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport (UN/EDIFACT) and the International Organization for Standardization ISO 9735 standard. These standards allow different companies to exchange transactional data reliably and automatically.

Construction has no equivalent universal standard. Software vendors, project owners, engineers, architects, and contractors must each find their own path to digital collaboration. This lack of formal standards has slowed efficiency gains and digitization of cross-company processes. However, what the industry lacks in standardization it increasingly makes up for through entrepreneurial innovation among software companies that are building practical solutions to bridge the gap.

The Cost of Fragmented Communication

When project partners cannot share information seamlessly, the consequences ripple across every phase of construction:

• Change orders get lost in email threads, causing delays and disputes
• Document versions proliferate without a central source of truth
• Subcontractors lack visibility into approval workflows and payment timelines
• Project owners receive inconsistent updates from different contractors
• Legacy on-premise software cannot communicate with modern cloud applications
• RFIs and submittals require manual re-entry across different systems

According to a recent study sponsored by Trimble, the transaction between construction project collaborators that causes the most disruption is the project change order. This single pain point illustrates why inter-company digital workflow solutions have become a priority for forward-thinking contractors.

Key Software Solutions Driving Inter-Company Connectivity

Extracker: Streamlining Change Order Management Across Companies

Extracker, launched in mid-2018, has grown rapidly by focusing on a specific pain point: the change order process between owners, general contractors, and subcontractors. As of early 2022, the company had approximately 1,900 firms using a free version and 150 paying customers.

The format of a change order, built around labor, materials, and equipment, is fairly standard across the industry. Extracker’s innovation lies in providing a common digital utility that project partners use to share this information. Instead of emailing PDF logs back and forth, teams use:

• Centralized change order registers with shareable links that update in real time
• Digital time and materials tags that capture extra work on the job site and feed it into the approvals workflow
• Mobile app capture that lets subcontractors log time and materials tags immediately, converting them to change order requests
• Real-time visibility for general contractors to see their change order exposure from any subcontractor with a single click

Extracker CEO Cameron Page describes the mission: “To become the industry standard for how change orders are shared in commercial construction.” The clarity this brings allows information to flow upward to project owners or downward from subcontractors to their own sub-tier partners.

Newforma: Connecting Document Workflows Across the Project Team

Newforma takes a different approach by focusing on project information management, particularly on the design and documentation side of construction. Chief Marketing and Product Officer Slater Latour notes that while building construction represents the majority of their use cases, their customer base spans nearly every flavor of construction including both civil and building work.

Newforma’s key capabilities include:

• Cross-platform project search that indexes documents across BIM 360, local file servers, and cloud storage locations, making everything searchable from a single interface
• An Outlook connector that files emails into the official project record so they sit alongside project data and become searchable
• Optical character recognition (OCR) that indexes even static documents including PDFs
• CAD and BIM viewer that allows stakeholders without expensive software licenses to view and comment on models
• Activity center that captures as-built updates from contractors

As Latour explains, the ability to access data in both on-premise and cloud-based sources is critical given the industry’s reliance on legacy software. “The beauty is that we can search in both places.”

Ryvit: The Integration Layer for Construction Software

Perhaps the most ambitious approach to inter-company digital workflows comes from Ryvit, which offers an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) product designed specifically for construction. Ryvit enables software vendors to develop integrations against a standard API, which then facilitates connections with any number of other software products.

The company currently connects dozens of software products covering asset management, change order management, compliance, ERP, expense management, CRM, service management, field productivity, and time tracking. This integration network acts as what COO Angie Licata calls a “data hub” potentially replacing the ERP as the central node through which all data flows.

The major ERPs dominating the construction space present a particular challenge:

As Ryvit CTO Chris Collins explains, “Access is definitely one of the things we provide. But all these ERPs are highly configurable, and each customer’s instance can be different. A RESTful API for an ERP does not fully empower another product. Professional services are still required because without skill, integrations are risky.”

Practical Approaches to Building Inter-Company Digital Workflows

Start with High-Friction Transactions

The most successful digital workflow initiatives in construction focus on the transactions that cause the most disruption. Change orders, RFIs, submittals, and document handoffs are natural starting points because every project partner feels the pain of broken processes in these areas.

Contractors looking to build inter-company digital workflows should consider the following steps:

1. Audit current handoff points where information passes between companies on your projects
2. Identify the top three friction points causing delays, disputes, or rework
3. Evaluate purpose-built solutions like Extracker for change orders or Newforma for document management
4. Assess your integration needs using the Ryvit model: what systems need to talk to each other and what data must flow between them
5. Start with a pilot project involving a general contractor and one or two key subcontractors to prove the workflow before scaling
6. Measure results in terms of cycle time reduction, error reduction, and stakeholder satisfaction

Bridge Legacy and Modern Systems

One of the most significant obstacles to inter-company digital workflows is the coexistence of legacy on-premise systems and modern cloud applications. As Latour notes, the long timeline of construction projects makes it difficult for many organizations to cycle off on-premise solutions without disrupting project operations.

The solution is not to force migration but to build bridges. Ryvit’s iPaaS model allows data to flow between on-premise ERPs and cloud-based field productivity tools, project management platforms, and accounting systems. This composable approach, where point solutions connect through integration layers, will become increasingly important as the industry adopts more specialized software tools.

The Future of Inter-Company Digital Workflows in Construction

Toward Open Integration Networks

The vision shared by companies like Ryvit, Newforma, and Extracker points toward an industry where software systems connect as easily as email connects people. As more software vendors build standard APIs that interface with integration platforms, network effects will accelerate adoption. Each new integration makes the network more valuable for everyone involved.

Angie Licata of Ryvit describes the ideal scenario: “The ERP is no longer the center of the hub, and potentially Ryvit can be. Where the ERP used to be the central thing everything would integrate through, you do not necessarily rely on the ERP as the center node anymore because you have got Ryvit as your data hub.” This shift from ERP-centric to integration-centric architecture represents a fundamental change in how construction technology stacks are designed.

Composable Platforms and the Slow Move to Cloud

Industry analysts at Gartner have noted that various industries will become more reliant on composable platforms, where myriad integrated and interchangeable point solutions replace broad enterprise systems. In construction, this trend is amplified by the industry’s reliance on specialized tools for estimating, project management, field reporting, accounting, and document control.

Advanced construction technology and automation equipment robotics drones and field reporting tools are increasingly cloud-native, but back-office systems often remain on-premise. The path forward is not an all-at-once migration but a gradual evolution where integration layers connect old and new. As Latour puts it, “We will see firms eventually go 100 percent cloud stack, but it will be a much slower evolution on average than other industries.”

Integration as a Competitive Advantage

Contractors who invest in inter-company digital workflows gain measurable advantages. Faster change order approvals, fewer document-related errors, better visibility into project financials, and stronger relationships with subcontractors and owners all contribute to project success. As the industry moves toward more connected workflows, the ability to participate in digital collaboration networks will become a differentiator in bidding and project execution.

How digital construction specification software improves building project delivery is just one example of how software-driven collaboration raises the bar for the entire industry. Similarly, smart construction software essential digital tools for modern builders demonstrate that the tools exist today to transform how project partners work together.

The construction industry may lack the formal data interchange standards found in manufacturing, but it is building something arguably more practical: a growing ecosystem of connected software solutions that address real-world workflow challenges. For contractors, the message is clear. The technology to connect across company boundaries exists and is maturing rapidly. The question is not whether to adopt inter-company digital workflows, but how quickly firms can integrate them into their operations to stay competitive in an increasingly connected construction environment.