Is a lack of on-site insight holding back optimal construction delivery

The construction industry is a broad church. Of the main challenges to rolling out industry-wide change is the sheer size, scale and complexity of construction as a sector, covering everything from one-man-band sub-contractors taking on small jobs to keep things ticking over, right the way through to vast, multi-decade infrastructure projects such as HS2 – not to mention everything in between.

Another key stumbling block is the industry’s reticence to adopt change in areas where traditional methods are deeply embedded. It’s not that the sector is scared of innovation – you only have to look at areas such as CAD and latterly BIM to see that change can be made – but in many cases, the range of different options and routes to make that change are confused.

In today’s built environment, companies need to make decisions that aren’t just quick, but also considered. The complexity, scale and range of projects that are being undertaken means that traditional methods of informing such decisions are no longer viable, especially over that project’s entire lifecycle.

Now more than ever, accurate data is essential to inform decision making at every stage, from tender and proposal right through to construction and delivery. Unfortunately, the slow speed of adoption means that these datapoints are getting missed throughout that journey, leading to significant challenges in areas such as enabling works, demobilisation and snagging.

In a busy industry, the pressure to drive this adoption is often falling to those on site, who typically are bombarded with dozens of tasks, of which trialing multiple digital tools from different providers is just one.

We see this on sites we visit all the time – it’s a huge task to change processes and get that cutthrough that sees innovation being adopted. This shouldn’t be the case - it is incumbent on those technology providers to educate site teams to make sure they have the ability to extract the value that will help them.

The simplest way of squaring that circle between educating teams and making it as easy as possible for them to adopt innovation is through biometrics. Everyone working on site passes through turnstiles, so combining that routine with biometric scanning can create a huge shortcut in bringing the data to the decision makers.

These biometrics are about so much more than who is on site and when. When done properly, they can be linked to a profile that contains approved information about each worker, including competencies and skills, the level of briefing they require, the distance they have travelled to site and many more datapoints that go towards project KPIs.

With this type of system, organisations are able to measure these datapoints through the duration of a project - all from a daily point of transaction with the worker or operative – which can be disseminated to the relevant stakeholders, be that the client, the framework or other parts of the supply chain.

This isn’t to say that capturing biometrics is the silver bullet. On bigger infrastructure projects where there is no perimeter fencing, for example, it can be a challenge just to know who is on site at a given time. While there are ways around this, such as a daily report to a site cabin with a scanner, this is a challenge to overcome.

Similarly, data is often missed in phases such as enabling works and demobilisation. This typically falls down to the vagaries of project finance, where early works don’t have enough money to spend on such on-site solutions. This is where the most work on establishing innovation needs to be done, as the snagging and defects processes are usually where those gaps in data and insight become most apparent.

The construction industry is on a digital transformation journey, and it is a marathon not a sprint. However, the need to adopt that innovation is getting greater by the day, and we all have a role to play in ensuring that capturing data is the foundation of that change.

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