By / Grant Cameron | Journal of Commerce

Construction companies must embrace change and leverage new technologies and tools such as big data collection and analysis, machine learning and trend analysis, and digital twin modeling if they hope to remain competitive, says Jordan Thomson, a professional engineer and senior manager at KPMG.

“We feel the move to digital and the broad array of technologies and approaches that it unlocks holds enormous benefit to all members of the project team,” Thomson explains. “As we’ve seen in the manufacturing industry, digital transformation promises to bring new levels of efficiency and performance. Contractors and designers that embrace these new technologies will be able to increase efficiently, develop more innovative solutions, improve safety outcomes, and provide better value to owners.

“While some construction companies have started this transformation, we feel there is a real risk that companies that don’t embrace these technologies will get left behind.”

Thomson, along with Kathleen Boyd, a manager at KPMG, who both work within the firm’s Global Infrastructure Advisory practice, recently provided their perspective on the issues in an insight report produced by the Canadian Construction Association (CCA) that looked at innovation and R&D in construction.

The report notes that, given the construction industry accounts for six per cent of global GDP, the adoption of new technologies and ways of working could have significant economic and social impacts across Canada and around the world.

Thomson says the shift is not just about delivering projects more cost effectively, but it will also enable the industry to take on more projects and more complex challenges to deliver on the demand for infrastructure.

“This is not to say that the industry is not adopting new technologies,” he says. “We see leaders in the industry making significant investment in new technologies and even naming chief information officers to prioritize pushing these types of initiatives forward. Even small- and medium-scale players across the industry are exploring how these technologies can improve their businesses, however these efforts are often piecemeal and siloed.”

Projects and the industry more broadly need a unified approach to how technologies will be implemented and how data will be collected, managed and shared across the project team in order to encourage investment and avoid duplication, he says.

“The key to driving this technological shift will be owners. Ultimately a lot of the upside of these new technologies reside with the owners, so they need to be the ones championing the technologies.”

Read more at | canada.constructconnect.com ■