“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,” he 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.
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. 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 CCA report notes major projects are amazing generators of big data, yet 96 per cent of all the data captured by the construction industry never gets analyzed or leveraged. Predictive analytics — the use of statistics and modelling to determine future performance — is also touted by Thomson as a way to help contractors improve scheduling, cost-estimating accuracy and optimize work planning by looking at past projects and factoring in weather and other project-specific variables.
The CCA report notes developing a digital twin early on in the life cycle of a project can unlock value and critical insights into the vast pools of design and construction data, allowing for more informed decision-making.