Josh Weiss is COO at Hexagon Geosystem, responsible for guiding the company’s business and operating models in several industries.
Technology is the professional partner contractors need. Understanding how technology can help the industry navigate the current landscape requires insight into the challenges that contractors face.
Many manufacturing industries benefit from largely standardized, repetitive processes that perform within highly controllable environments. These conditions typically result in practices and systems that prioritize specialization as the winning game.
These conditions stand in stark contracts to the project nature of infrastructure development. Here, unique and highly interdependent operations accentuate the possibility of outliers.
This explains the frequent occurrence of projects blowing through time and budget goals. Construction is a collaboration game, and generalists — not specialists — often surface as the winning players.
Successful ADCM solutions and technologies will need to excel in coordinating critical success factors early and comprehensively in the life of an infrastructure asset. More specifically, the right technology mix needs to address all phases of construction.
Technology is not killing jobs.
Demographics, preferences, and the cyclical nature of the construction industry systemically hurt the construction labor market. Most contractors anticipate a growing quantitative and qualitative skill shortage.
In this context, successful technologies need to be easy to use and collaborative. The last years have seen promising improvements in user interfaces and integrated workflows, allowing generalists to quickly be efficient. In addition, cloud-enabled data sharing and support functions enable everyone to work as a team.
However, technology doesn't stop with enabling workers to accomplish more on the job site. We're experiencing an emerging generation of operators leveraging technology to turn construction equipment into collaborative robots.
This approach is redefining how the job is done on-site. Never has it been more accurate to say that technology is not killing jobs. Rather, technology is skilling jobs.
Finally, technology can also play a key role in providing safety awareness on-site. As workers, equipment, and stationary objects are digitally enabled and spatially aware, the prevention of accidents and collisions needs to be part of the ADCM technology scope.
Making a connection — giving job sites the data they need.
The last decade has seen tremendous growth in the number of connected devices.
Many construction machines are now able to self-diagnose their health condition, order their own parts, and alert owners and operators on key events. While these innovations have improved cost and utilization parameters, different approaches will be needed to address productivity.
For gains to happen here, ADCM technologies need to understand if and how the machine produced the right output at the right time and the right location. Machine data thus needs to do more than look in the mirror; it needs to assess how well machine control systems have shaped the site.
Both cost and sustainability priorities require the construction industry to review how efficiently precious resources are transformed into lasting infrastructure. This is not just good design; it also means optimal estimations on the quantity and location of where materials need to be moved.
Downloadable data models can then instruct machine control systems to move material as planned. Finally, this also means that the actual construction is documented in "infrastructure time capsules" available to later stakeholders for operating, maintaining, or refurbishing the asset.
It's time to start having the right conversations about technology and infrastructure, and we have everything we need to begin. What are we waiting for?
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