Digitalisation in the construction industry

Technology and digitalisation is being adopted at an ever increasing pace. What have been the benefits of digitalisation to the construction industry? Do we need to go faster? The topic was covered in depth by the BMBI experts at the latest annual BMBI Round Table Debate. This is what they said:

Tim Wood – Editor of BMN: What have been the benefits to the industry and what, if any, are the barriers?

Andrew Brewin – Finance Director, Keystone Lintels: We’re seeing digital and AI become bigger and bigger. Most of us saw when the internet started 20, 25 years ago, it changed life as we know it. I think AI is the thing we’re going to be saying, ‘that changed life’. It’s not science fiction, it’s working in business at the minute.

Construction has embraced technology in some aspects. I know we as a manufacturer have embraced it. Efficiency is the main thing. Collaboration is going to be key in construction. BIM’s going to help that and various other tools from the designing through to the manufacturing, and the building of the construction. I think technology is great if it works and you’ve got the ability and the investment and the time and you bring people on that journey with it.

John Newcomb – Chief Executive, BMF: At the conference in Copenhagen, we had one of the board directors of Stark present. In one of the slides, Boston Consulting Group had done some work, and they showed the level of digitalisation across sectors. There were around 30 sectors on there in terms of degrees of digitalisation. Construction was just above agriculture and a long way behind some of the other sectors. We’ve got a long way to go.

We’re trying to develop an industry data pool, we’ve had some conversations, and launched this product data template. I come from a retail background, so, I used to deal with Tesco, Sainsbury’s and John Lewis.  – the quality of the data, even things like images, is appalling in this industry.

You’ve got to remember, 70% of our members are below £50 million turnover, and the construction industry is predominantly an SME-based industry – 95% of firms are SMEs. Those smaller businesses don’t even have a photograph of a product that’s in their portfolio. Because of the golden thread and the post-Grenfell environment, there’s going to be more pressure put on manufacturers in terms of data quality, but we’re starting from a very low base.

Ian Doherty – Chief Executive, Owlett-Jaton: We’re working very hard on a BIM project. It’s got a very large and complex product range, over 30,000 products, some of which are manufactured, some which are bought in. That is a big piece of moving the whole thing forward, the quality of data. I was at a presentation last week from one of the ERP manufacturers about where they were with building AI into the core systems. Everyone’s thinking AI is going to do big data analysis for us and find magic trends we never spotted. And they were actually saying it’s more about being a workload assistant, of automating routine things. It can take an email, read the email for you, and put the order into your system. So, your operator is not spending their time keying it. They have to review it and make sure got it’s right, but they can focus on the pricing or communicating with a customer. I think a lot of what we’re going to see in AI is helping processes along.

Andy Simpson – Packed Products Director, Heidelberg Materials: We use AI now all the time. A lot of orders come in via email and it reads the email, puts the order in the system. We just say, ‘Yes, that’s fine’, and it cuts out our human error. It really has improved order efficiency and delivery efficiency. Digitisation is one of our five pillars for Heidelberg. We use a lot in production on the kilns. We can manage kilns from all over the world, make sure they’re efficient, they’re burning correctly etc. In distribution, we use it to schedule our trucks. We even use it in concrete now with sensors that tell people how strong the concrete is so they don’t have to take cubes any more. It’s cutting out these mundane tasks, just increasing efficiency.

Information exchange as well. The bots just say, ‘This is all your stuff. These are all your invoices.’ There’s a video last night on our website of one of our customers saying how brilliant it is because they’ve cut out 8 hours a week searching for invoices. We want our customers to have frictionless transactions from start to finish.

But there is the threat as well. We had a cyber attack last year. Now, everything is absolutely bolted down, but you’ve got to have a backup plan as well. Cyber security is essential now in big business.

Andrew Brewin: We’ve put the technology into the ordering system, and it’s allowed more time for customer services to phone, inform, and help the customer. It’s improved accuracy. But it’s also improved the quality of merchant information as well.

The information in your system has to be correct. If not, it just becomes another bottleneck.

Callum Budd – Research Projects Director, MRA Research: My background was in market research with IT and tech companies. And over 10 years, I saw lots of technologies come and adoption cycles change. Five to eight years ago we were talking about cloud computing, we probably all use that now. Then we had digital transformation quite generally, which is still going. Then we had the COVID challenge, working securely from home. Now we have got AI, which we’ve been using for a long time, but that has now exploded through generative AI, things like ChatGPT. It’s changing the way that we work.

But we need to be very careful with the short-term hype, there will be lots of challenges. We need to make sure it’s done securely and safely. There are lots of bigger, more complex projects that still need human involvement.

Andy Simpson: We don’t like taking people out of the business unnecessarily. We redeploy them to sell more. We upskilled all our order takers, our customer service agents. They’re all multi-skilled now. They’re checking the orders, they’re dealing with any queries that are coming in from customers, and then they’re trying to sell and educate our customers to say, ‘Don’t buy that from here. Buy that from our other plant because it’s more efficient and we’re going to cut down delivery miles etc.’ It gives us time to spend on more meaningful tasks than just putting orders in a system.

Charles Burns – Divisional Director, Brett Martin: We’ve done exactly as you. We have AI’d order intake and increased the conversations between our business and the customer. That’s where people add value. Whether they’re selling or whether they’re redirecting deliveries or late deliveries, whatever it is, they’re actually talking to people.

Andy Simpson: We need to be careful with the technology that we don’t remove that human interface with the customer. It is a people industry.

Andrew Brewin: There’s a natural fear that you’ve brought the technology in and then suddenly their job is going to be removed. But it’s making them more value-added. Whether that’s customer service, whether it’s safety, whether it’s sustainability.

Andy Simpson: In that way, your employees don’t fear technology either. Because if they see a new thing coming in and then half the people disappear, next time you come out with a new idea, they don’t want to embrace it. The message is that it’s not to reduce heads, it’s to improve business performance.

This write-up was first published in the Builders Merchants News.