Accenture has acquired Avicado, a Miami-based provider of construction technology and programme delivery services for capital project owners, a deal that shows professional services groups buying the owner-side systems expertise that connects construction data to programme decisions.

Accenture, a Dublin-headquartered professional services and technology firm with about 814,000 employees and annual revenue of $74bn (€68bn), launched Accenture Construct in September, bringing together strategic advisory, engineering, project delivery and technology services for capital projects across more than 5,000 practitioners.

Avicado, founded in 2015 by Avidahn Levin, implements and integrates construction and project management software from Procore, Autodesk, Trimble, Oracle and Kahua, and acts as owner representative on site selection, procurement, controls, schedule and document management for owners across data centres, transport, healthcare, education, power and water.

More than 190 Avicado professionals will join Accenture Construct in the United States, adding digital and systems consulting capability to the practice.

Accenture Construct CEO Adam Shaw said the deal gives owners proven industry platforms, people, process and AI, and lets Accenture take greater accountability for client outcomes, while Avicado Founder Avidahn Levin said existing clients gain access to Accenture’s global capabilities.

The strategic logic is owner-side control: HKA’s CRUX analysis of 2,410 projects found cost claims averaging 33% of budgets and extensions of time reaching 65.8% of planned schedules, with change in scope the largest cause of conflict at 33.4% of projects.

Design-related factors drove claims and disputes on 40.5% of projects, and data centre projects, one of Avicado’s client sectors, saw schedule overruns of 112%, which is the kind of information failure that integrated project systems and owner representation aim to catch early.

HKA also noted that the industry has not yet absorbed the potential benefits of AI and other advances, which leaves room for providers that combine software implementation with delivery accountability.

For the sector, consultancies that pair platform integration with owner representation are becoming the model for managing capital programmes, and contractors working for those owners will increasingly be asked to feed project data into shared systems.

Source: Consulting.us