A clear and universally understood definition framework would help increase stakeholder awareness and confidence in adopting innovative construction methods and could help encourage a more structured and focused conversation across the industry at large..
The choice of vendor will then be dependent on what a client values more, which could be: cost; location (to limit travel miles); overall carbon footprint; or the number of apprentices they take on, for instance..The ‘Defining the Need’ report is a fantastic first manifestation of the ‘harmonise, digitise and rationalise’ policy.
But the use of cross-sector data hints at even more powerful opportunities in the future, such as:.Longer term pipelines..The Construction Playbook includes policies for publishing commercial pipelines and developing long-term plans for key asset types.
The data set developed by the Hub could be expanded (‘upwards’ from spaces into assets and complexes and ‘downwards’ into sub-assemblies and products) to create a holistic data set that would allow suppliers to carry out their own analysis and forecasting.. Where better to publish this data than on a digital marketplace?.Searching the data for ‘SL_90_10_47 Lifts’ would show the exact number of lifts in the five-year pipeline and allow government to place contracts for the manufacture, installation and assembly of bulk orders of lifts, creating economies of scale;.
Open sourcing this data set would then allow third parties to develop their own goods and services (in exactly the way that open source data published by Transport for London, OpenStreetMaps and others has allowed the creation of common apps such as Citymapper, Bus Checker and Waze).
This could create a new ecosystem of apps and tools that could sit alongside e-commerce to help clients, designers and manufacturers;.We must stop and ask ourselves, if not now, when?.
To learn more about our Design to Value approach to design and construction, sign up for our monthly newsletter here:.http://bit.ly/BWNewsUpdatesDespite its vast size, the construction industry is well known to be one of the least digitalised sectors in the world.
While there are pockets of the ecosystem pushing technology in areas like DfMA, Kanban and Just-in-Time (JIT) systems, the majority of construction remains relatively undigitalised.At Bryden Wood, we’ve long been committed to the pursuit of digital innovation and construction technology.