Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection watches your project data in real time and flags when something deviates from the expected pattern. It's your early warning system — catching financial irregularities, safety patterns, quality issues, and schedule drift before they compound into serious problems.

The system learns what "normal" looks like from your historical data, then monitors your active projects against that baseline. When a cost code is burning faster than it should, or a subcontractor's productivity drops below their historical average, the system surfaces it immediately.

What I Build Anomaly Detection For

1. Financial Irregularity Detection

Monitors project cost data for unusual patterns: invoices that don't match purchase orders, cost codes burning at unexpected rates, supplier pricing that deviates from contracted rates. Catches mistakes and potential fraud early — not during the quarterly audit.

In practice:

• A concrete supplier's invoices start coming in 8% above the contracted unit price. The system flags it the week it happens, not three months later during reconciliation.
• Labor costs on a project phase spike without a corresponding scope change. Your PM gets an alert to investigate.

2. Safety Pattern Analysis

Looks for patterns in your safety data that aren't obvious in isolation. A single near-miss might not raise alarms, but three near-misses involving the same equipment type across different projects in two weeks tells a story. The system connects those dots.

In practice:

• Identifies equipment types, work activities, or time-of-day patterns associated with elevated incident rates
• Flags when a site's safety metrics start deviating from your company baseline — even if no single incident is severe
• Surfaces correlations between weather, crew composition, and safety events

3. Quality Control Monitoring

Tracks inspection results, rework rates, and quality metrics across projects and trades. When a particular trade's rework rate climbs above their historical average, the system flags it for investigation before the punchlist grows into a warranty issue.

In practice:

• A drywall sub's inspection fail rate jumps from 3% to 11% over two months. The system alerts your QC team.
• Material test results that fall near the edge of specifications get flagged — they're technically passing but trending toward failure.

4. Schedule Performance Tracking

Monitors actual progress against planned milestones and flags when activities are falling behind at a rate that will cascade into downstream delays. The system doesn't just tell you something is late — it identifies which future activities are at risk and by how much.

In practice:

• An activity is 5 days behind plan, but the system identifies three dependent activities that will be affected and estimates the cumulative impact on the project completion date
• A crew's production rate drops below the rate needed to meet the milestone, even if individual daily reports look close to plan