Of the hundreds of different business processes that affect the survival of a company operating in the construction industry, some of the main ones, as they were thousands of years ago, are the processes of qualitative calculation of element group quantities, project costing and time.
It was commodity-money relations that were one of the main reasons for the emergence of written language. And it was commodity-money relations thousands of years ago that formed the first legally significant clay tablets of calculations of materials and works in construction projects.
While for tens of thousands of years estimating processes remained unchanged and calculating project scope was a manual process, with the advent of ERP and CAD tools, the traditional world of estimating is becoming automated.
Of the thousands of different solutions and applications, the systems responsible for cost and time performance attract the most business attention
The main interest of a construction business is centred on the time and cost data of the work in a project. Estimating and costing departments pump up their calculation skills with each project in order to reduce the calculation error. Historical cost and process time data is collected during the construction of past projects throughout the life of a construction company and recorded in systems databases. The availability and quality of this data is a major competitive advantage for any construction organisation.
To understand the process of creating estimates, costings, and schedules in construction, we will draw a parallel to costing and calculating the cost of dinner at a restaurant.
To determine the total cost of an evening at a restaurant, a manager would need to make a grocery list and calculate the preparation time for each dish, then multiply the resulting costs by the number of guests. Similarly, in construction, we develop itemized costings for each category of project elements (entities), resulting in a total project cost by summing the costs of all categories-entities in the final estimate.
Calculations in the world of construction are kitchen recipes from building resources and materials.
In the very first stage of calculating the cost of the entire project and in the form of calculations and schedules, it is necessary to first collect in the form of a table all the items, work and resources that the company operates in the execution of its construction projects.
Information on all elements that can be used in construction projects is collected in the company's "Construction Resources, Materials and Works Database" and this database (or table) is a key source for all subsequent cost and time calculations.
Using the Pandas library, we convert the extracted text we convert an image or photo table into a structured table view
The code written by ChatGPT uses the pytesseract library (Tesseract for Python) to convert an image into text using OCR (optical character recognition) and the pandas library to convert that text into a structured form, i.e. a DataFrame.
Tesseract is one of the leading open source OCR engines, originally developed by HP and now supported by Google. Known for its accuracy and ability to recognise over 100 languages, Tesseract is widely used for OCR tasks.
The conversion process usually involves pre-processing to improve image quality, after which various algorithms are applied for pattern detection, feature extraction or object recognition. As a result, unstructured visual information is converted into structured data.
