In a 2021 Workforce Survey Analysis, AGC found that 88% of companies surveyed were experiencing project delays—that’s nearly nine out of ten. Now more than ever, construction companies are faced with the challenge to do more with less and keep projects on track in the face of unforeseen circumstances.
While certain conditions and factors in the industry can’t be controlled, there are 3 construction workflows that can reduce the margin of error to ensure a project stays resilient. This requires operational excellence in the areas that can be predicted and made more efficient.
What are the three construction workflows a company should prioritize?
1. Project team communication
Communication among field teams, supervisors, and the office is crucial—and can be cumbersome. With so many moving pieces of a project happening at once, getting the necessary message out to everyone in a timely, effective manner is no easy feat.
Companies need to find a way to remove the barriers to communication. By doing so, they’ll save everyone on the project team valuable time that would otherwise be spent tracking progress, in meetings to get everyone up to speed, or playing telephone.
2. Finding and addressing quality issues
Quality of construction can make or break a project’s ability to stay on track. Quality issues or mistakes found too late in the process can be the kiss of death for moving onto the next phase—and as a result, teams remain stuck in the final 10 or 20% of completion for too long. This won’t just cost time and manpower, it’ll directly affect a project’s budget and profitability, too.
The only option to streamline and prevent these costly quality issues is to catch them early and address them quickly. Technology that helps companies see progress in real time opens the door for making smarter decisions and adapting faster.
3. Reporting on construction completion
When a project does make it through the final 10%, the work isn’t over yet. Teams must provide an objective, detailed overview of the completion—which again takes time and resources. There’s more information to gather, and no efficient way to compile it using manual efforts alone.
Teams should be focused on projects, not paperwork or reporting. Streamlining the process for creating detailed reports can free up their focus while enhancing the level of reporting and insights for a company.
All this sounds easier said than done, doesn’t it? Enter, automated progress tracking.
The secret to saving time while increasing accuracy
By implementing a technology that can continuously monitor performance and provide predictive insights, construction companies are able to achieve operational excellence.
Platforms like Doxel act as a digital surveyor to automatically track progress across more than 75 different construction stages in real time, freeing up the project team’s time and resources.
Instead of manually walking the jobsite every day or week to capture exact progress, Doxel works with a 360° video to act as a digital surveyor in minutes. Combining the power of computer vision with BIM means companies have an objective truth of the status of a site—and can understand progress, schedule, and budget better than ever before.
If it sounds too good to be true, it isn’t.
Tune in to our webinar Almost Done, Isn’t Done to hear from two successful construction companies on how they’re leveraging real-time progress tracking to automate and achieve more.
Communication can make or break a construction project. A report from the Project Management Institute found that ineffective communication was the main contributor to project failure one-third of the time. An even more alarming finding from the research is that 56% of budgets allocated to projects are at risk due to poor communication.
Without objective insights alignment among field and office teams, knowing what’s happening on a project becomes a daunting task—one that could put a project (and its profitability) at risk.
3 common communication challenges in construction
1. Delayed communication
Timely communication (especially between the field and the office) is hard to achieve. Field teams are focused on a hundred different things at once, and relaying project updates typically happens at the end of their day. Because field leaders aren’t able to instantly communicate every facet of a project’s progress as it happens, there is a lag time and gap in each day’s reporting.
2. Inconsistent communication
In addition to being delayed, communication from the field to the office isn’t always consistent. The more variables and people added to the equation, the more potential for confusion and uncertainty. Communication on a project can very quickly turn into a game of telephone—and teams are forced to hold more meetings and conversations to ensure mutual understanding.
3. Missing communication
While delayed and inconsistent communication can hold a project back, missing communication can halt it entirely. If proper communication isn’t happening, neither is profitable building.
All these challenges in communication don’t just create extra stress and work on a project—they can have a deeper impact on the data and tracking, too. Without everyone on the same page, the reporting and insights are left to everyone’s individual perspective. As a result, the project’s insights suffer.
The value of objective insights
Accurate, reliable data allows construction companies to remove subjectivity and replace it with objective accountability. Insights that are trackable and consistent bring everyone together on the same page to make informed decisions, faster.
Improve communication and progress tracking
Objective insights alleviate the friction of project communication and save everyone time. Gone are the days of asking for updates or trying to wrangle everyone together in one room. Companies that leverage shared project data have a real-time look into progress and can collaborate to build more efficiently. The information isn’t just received faster—it’s more accurate and can be distilled down to the entire team without pulling valuable resources away from the job at hand.
Streamline billing and accountability
With shared insights around the percentage of the build completed, contractors have a source of truth they can use for billing. Instead of blindly trusting what subcontractors report on, companies can verify progress and reconcile it with what’s reported to keep building partners accountable.
How do companies get objective insights?
The key to collecting reliable insights is through automated progress tracking. The right tool can increase team alignment and communication, without adding effort to the project team’s plate.
Doxel brings predictability to construction projects by providing critical insight with objective analytics. The AI-powered computer vision builds a digital twin of the jobsite on a weekly basis—providing true progress reporting and near real-time data. Doxel acts as a digital surveyor to capture and quantify project progress and eliminates the need for teams to manually calculate and report on it. The result is detailed, shared progress tracking from a single source across every project stakeholder and subcontractor.
Now more than ever, construction companies are looking for ways to stand out from the competition—and that starts with staying on top of the latest technology that helps them build more efficient, profitable projects.
The future of construction technology will be a hybrid of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning working alongside the industry’s workforce.
But what does that mean?
Artificial intelligence, according to IBM, is the use of computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind.
Machine learningis a subset of artificial intelligence that leverages algorithms to automatically learn and improve from data without the help of humans or consistent programming.
Put more simply, artificial intelligence is the brain of the computer, and machine learning is the part of that brain that learns from data and makes informed decisions based on what it has learned.
How Artificial intelligence is Being Used in Construction
1. Generative Design
Computer scientists have found a way to make the process of designing a building more efficient and accurate. By starting with the goals and parameters of a project, generative design is able to explore every possible iteration of a solution until it comes up with the best option.
This technology and its use has the potential to save architects and designers countless hours upfront—but it doesn’t replace the human touch completely. Once the optimal solution is found for the design of a building, a designer still needs to fine-tune the details and take it from there.
2. Construction Robots
Robots are being utilized on construction projects to perform repetitive tasks (such as bricklaying) using AI to detect changes in conditions and maximize efficiency. While only a few robots have been added to the project ranks so far, it is expected that more of these AI-powered workers will be used as a method of streamlining productivity.
What’s our favorite robot in construction, you ask? Meet Spot: a robot dog created by Boston Dynamics used to carry image-capturing or laser scanning equipment that ventures where humans can’t. Spot’s ability to walk himself autonomously around a jobsite, including on uneven terrain, makes him a project’s best friend. Spot may not have AI infused into his DNA yet, but the future generations of Spot will incorporate AI for predictive and preventative analysis.
3. Smart Tools
Milwaukee Tool first dabbled into the technology space with their wirelessly connected tools, but they’ve since enhanced their capabilities with AI to pinpoint the exact locations of where a tool was last seen. And they didn’t stop there—by adding algorithms and more advanced sensors to their tools, Milwaukee is able to combine the data of a motor drive with motor load information to make decisions on false trips.
4. Predictive-based Safety Monitoring
It should come as no surprise that these technological concepts are being applied to the most important priority in construction: safety. Companies like NewMetrix have created an AI-powered solution to help predict (and prevent) safety incidents on projects.
By leveraging a construction-specific AI model, their platform can analyze existing data along with their proprietary program to provide actionable incident insights that have the power to keep workers safe.
5. Progress and Quality Analysis
While BIM has opened the door for 3D modeling of a project, it’s still nearly impossible to tell the progress or quality of a build without a human resource to manually sift through and analyze images. That is, until now.
Doxel’s computer vision-based progress tracking leverages AI to act as a digital surveyor that delivers insights and reporting in real time. It can automatically analyze visual data, measure installed quantities, and inspect quality for more than 75 different construction stages. This not only saves companies time, it also mitigates the risk of errors and delays that could become costly.
Many construction companies are at a crossroads as they think about the future of their business, and who will be a part of it.
More than 40% of the current U.S. construction workforce is expected to retire over the next decade. This generation of seasoned superintendents and project leaders will leave behind big shoes to fill in both skill and knowledge, and the industry’s current skilled labor shortage doesn’t exactly help either.
While many owners, GCs and trade contractors have programs in place to mentor younger generations and train them to step in, it won’t be enough to bridge the gap. That’s why it’s important for companies to ensure they are innovating to attract more workers of a new generation.
Appealing to a tech-savvy generation
The construction industry has made huge strides to change and adopt more technology, but it can’t stop now. The younger generation that’s coming into the workforce over the next ten years was raised in a time where technology was already prevalent and is like second nature to them.
If a company wants to attract and retain a new generation of field leaders, they need to have processes in place that don’t just utilize technology, but are on the forefront of innovation, too.
The old way of progress tracking
A project isn’t truly done until it’s done done. And whether or not it gets to done done on time and under budget all comes down to how it’s being tracked during the construction phase. The old way of progress tracking involves a ton of manual effort and even more paper. Field teams would have to document what happened by hand on a regular basis and manually report on the overall progress completed.
Not only was this inefficient and extremely time-consuming, it also made it nearly impossible to try to predict where the project was headed or spot any potential issues fast enough to fix them. Even with the utilization of 3D and BIM models, knowing where a project stands hasn’t been as automated as it should be.
Convincing new, younger workers to take on these outdated processes isn’t an easy sell. Chances are, they’ll feel their time is being wasted since they are so used to the convenience and automation that technology can bring. In order to attract more workers to be on project and field teams, the processes they follow need to be seamless and even a little exciting.
AI-powered, automated progress
Construction companies that are leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the collection and analysis of project data are already ahead of the game. While the new generation may be more traditionally more technologically savvy, AI is new and exciting to everyone.
Rather than spending hours per week manually inputting and calculating progress and materials, solutions like Doxel use AI alongside 360-degree capture to automatically identify true, objective progress. This ability to bring predictability to projects doesn’t just save field teams time—it provides critical insights that help avoid delays and cost overruns at the overarching project level.
Instead of them feeling like just another cog in the machine there to collect data over and over again, technology of this caliber empowers workers to think critically about the status of projects and seek a deeper understanding of what’s happening each day. Not to mention the sense of fulfillment that comes when a team works together on a project that is able to be completed earlier with increased safety, less expense, and higher quality.
Ready to embrace the future of progress tracking?
We can help you empower a new generation of field leaders. See how Doxel works in a personalized demo today.
It’s been 80 years since the industry saw measurable gains in productivity.
Construction is one of the largest industries in the world, accounting for $10 trillion annually, about 13 percent of global GDP. But while productivity in adjacent industries like petroleum and mining has skyrocketed with the advent of new technologies, productivity in the construction sector has remained flat.
A new company called Doxel, which today announced $4.5 million in funding and unveiled an artificial intelligence and computer-vision system for the construction industry, is betting it can change that. With backing from Andreessen Horowitz, Doxel has positioned itself to shake up an industry that has been slow to change over the last half-century.
Currently, the big problem managing construction projects is accurately predicting and measuring a single metric: labor productivity. While managers can easily tabulate how many hours a construction worker spends on a task, they don’t have an accurate measure of how much work is actually accomplished or whether that work is being done correctly.
The result is a gross disparity between expectations and results.
According to McKinsey & Company, ninety-eight percent of large-scale construction projects are delivered, on average, eighty percent over budget and twenty months behind schedule.
The crux of the Doxel’s proposition is that you can’t improve productivity if you can’t measure it. To that end, the company uses autonomous devices to visually monitor every inch of a project day-by-day. It feeds that data to proprietary deep learning algorithms that inspect the quality of installed work and quantify progress in real time.
As a result, project managers can react to inefficiencies immediately.
“Without real-time visibility into quality and progress, managers simply can’t boost productivity,” CEO and cofounder Saurabh Ladha explains. “Our turnkey solution digitizes the physical world and compares actual performance to original schedule and budget plans.”
The company uses autonomous devices, including drones, equipping them with LIDAR and HD cameras. Drones are growing increasingly common on construction sites for everything from inspection to updating clients.
Doxel’s proprietary artificial intelligence algorithm processes three-dimensional visual data to inspect installation quality and quantify how much material has been installed correctly.
“If you could have an alarm that went off when your project was going over budget or off course, wouldn’t you want to use it?” poses Lars Dalgaard, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, nicely cutting to the heart of Doxel’s sales pitch. “For an industry that is notorious for cost overruns and delays, we see Doxel as the canary in the coalmine for construction projects.”
Andreessen Horowitz led Doxel’s latest funding round.
