Embrace innovation to solve construction challenges

The construction industry needs to embrace AI and innovative approaches to improve efficiency and profitability and create the right environment to tackle some of its biggest challenges, Massimiliano Crea, regional board director for John Sisk & Son, told GIRI’s February members’ meeting.

Construction is perceived as a “fragmented, disjointed dinosaur of an industry,” said Massimiliano. “This is a persistent image and something that we haven’t really tried to tackle in the right way, yet on a good day we build some of the world’s greatest cities.”

He argued that the way infrastructure is procured in the UK is dated and needs a fresh, more efficient approach. However, he believes the real issue is inconsistent investment. “Currently, investment is unpredictable, demand isn’t clearly mapped out, and the political cycles contribute to that. There are different agendas, different policies, creating a ‘boom and bust' industry and that creates uncertainty. Uncertainty in delivery means that the industry’s business models aren’t efficient and profitable.”

Massimiliano said he believes the solution is centred around modern methods of construction – but not necessarily as it is currently imagined. “I think it’s really about the strategic ability to use fully integrated data and that will take time. There are so many good pieces of software, so many ways of aggregating data, and so many databases, but it is difficult to make sense of it all. A lot of the projects we work on have a huge wealth of data, but it isn’t easy to identify trends or delve into it in any detail.”

The importance of innovation

How does the industry develop the new approaches it needs to become more efficient? Massimiliano explored how to create the environment that enables the sector to tackle the issues it faces, and one of these is fostering innovation. “This isn’t something you can mandate. There is a randomness to innovation, an intersectionality when two worlds collide, but you can create the right environment to encourage those collisions to occur more often.”

He shared an example of an innovation that occurred in just such circumstances. John Sisk & Son has been working with Quickbase, a subsidiary of US software firm Quickbooks that provides dynamic work management solutions, to develop a bespoke QA tool. “This was used on a remedial project that included many items of rework, and we developed a bespoke sequential staged QA tool that monitors the progress of the QA in a live scenario. This means that at any given time we could see the status of each item of rework. It feeds into a 4D model, and this is now being integrated into a 5D model so we’re starting to capture the cost against each of those individual remedials as well as timeframes. So we are creating a database of accurate, valid data that can be reviewed to deliver insights for the future.”

Artificial intelligence

This poses an interesting question, said Massimiliano. “What could AI do with this database to improve the understanding of it? Are there AI agents out there that we could use to explore whether there are other opportunities to derive value from this data or is there a feedback loop that can be created within the industry to improve the product? If you imagine this aggregated across the entire industry, there would be wealth of information that could direct us in a positive way.”

Digital placeholders

In another example, Massimiliano explained how John Sisk & Son used a digital twin to derisk the provisional sums on its Haringey Civic Centre project to reach a fixed lump sum price. “We had a gentleman walk around the building with a camera on his helmet, completely mapping the asset from top to bottom. We compared that digital twin with the model and zoomed into each of the elements, looking at what details needed to be created to build it technically and to quantify risk against each of those elements.”

The potential here, he said, is in using this as a compliance tool from the very outset of a project, particularly in terms of the Building Safety Act, where a backlog of approvals from the Building Safety Regulator is delaying the start of many projects. “What if the way to procure is to create a placeholder that has compliance elements linked into it? So the client would create a placeholder digitally for integrators to bring together all the different pieces of the puzzle and upload these into the model and do clash detection to demonstrate its compliance.”

Such an idea would, he suggested, fundamentally change the time it takes to demonstrate compliance. “It would remove any backlog because, with a series of clicks, you could determine whether a proposal or tender was compliant with the overall requirements. And if we create that digital twin and digital placeholder at the outset, not only could it be used from a regulatory perspective, it could also be used to expedite planning.” 

Could clients, he asked, map demand by issuing batches of these placeholders, enabling contractors and developers to propose different solutions for how these tie in the overarching local plans? “This would minimise the front end of projects by reducing the back and forth, and greatly expedite the pre-construction and procurement phases. And if we can start to map out the placeholders for what our built environment will look like, we can start to map the demand, which creates a business incentive to invest in the manufacturing capabilities that we so desperately need to return to our shores.” 

“There are some great examples of where we are seeing this kind of thing start to emerge, but it is certainly not the norm, and I think our collective driver is to try to make this a reality.” 

Find out more about GIRI membership.