Changing the face of construction

The built environment industry carries a few old stereotypes about the type of people you encounter, the type and quality of work that individuals do, and their experiences. Many of these stereotypes have been very accurate in the past, but the advent of BIM will result in totally new roles and modern working practices. It will also encourage new, younger graduates from subjects like data science and robotics to approach construction with totally fresh eyes. This section looks at the impact of those changing groups on the industry.

What do you think of when you hear the word construction? Despite what you already know about the digital future of the industry just from picking up this book, that’s not what most people think of. Here are a few common (mis)perceptions:

• Construction is dusty and dirty work.
• Construction is hazardous and dangerous.
• Construction is full of inequality and discrimination.
• Construction is set in its ways.

An influx of dynamic, inspired, young, and diverse people in the workforce will only occur when industry organizations work together to address some of these key aspects on the ground. Think about how you can effect change in the organization and construction sector you’re involved in. Does your work contribute to a positive image of digital innovation or just reinforce the dusty stereotypes?

Look at how the face of construction is changing. You can build more sustainably, safely, quickly, and connectively than ever before. Through innovations like mobile devices linking with near-field communication (NFC) and as pre-fabrication evolves into designing for manufacture and assembly (DfMA), you can reduce or remove much of the inefficiency of traditional practice and rethink the construction site. Working together, everyone can make the industry accessible and welcoming.

A recent report by the Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR) showed that the median average age of construction workers in the United States has been increasing for years; it was 38 in 2000 and the latest figures indicate that this number is now up to 42.4. The construction industry isn’t attracting enough young people and new graduates. Lots of other exciting industries exist, and construction just can’t compete with leisure, entertainment, and Internet businesses.

Revolutionizing construction and site processes is going to rely on soft skills (the nontechnical abilities people have, like cooperation, problem-solving, and enthusiasm) and how people work and communicate as much as it will rely on new technology. You can find out more ideas for this in Chapter 12.

Automating construction

The construction industry has embraced technology in the past, and just like other sectors, construction is becoming more automated too. Just like a home dishwasher or vacuum cleaner, machines increase efficiency.

You can compare the shift in farming to how construction has changed. In the early 1800s, more than 80 percent of US workers were in farming. The number of agricultural workers has seen year-on-year decline and is now closer to 2 percent. Much of that decline is because machinery replaced manual labor, as it has in manufacturing during the last century.

As we discuss further in Chapter 20, construction is one of the last industries to still be full of repetitive manual tasks carried out by humans. So suggesting that the increased digitization and automation of construction workplaces won’t have a negative impact on manual labor is naive, because it probably will. Innovation will lead to new opportunities for the construction industry, which will require everyone to develop new skills and adapt to change.

Watching for encouraging signs: Performing better

Construction can sometimes seem a bit backward. It not only appears to be slow moving; it resists transformation. In reality, construction does change, but that change just happens very gradually. This section highlights how much improvement has taken place recently, in areas like sustainability and site safety.

The three of us are all very optimistic about this industry. Despite how slow people can be to adopt change at times, you don’t have to look too far to find examples of how the construction industry demonstrates the desire to move forward. Think about the following:

• How hazardous methods have been removed through health and safety regulation and the number of deaths and injuries caused by construction work has reduced.
• How people encouraging sustainability has made ecologically responsible products far more common, reduced site waste, and lowered CO2 emissions. This has also increased the average efficiency of housing and public buildings like hospitals and schools.

In the next sections, you can find out how encouraging people to consider the environmental impact of construction work is a great example of the kind of progress that we want to see happen with BIM.

Sustainability just means looking after a system like the earth’s environment, so that it continues to produce enough resources to supply people’s needs without running out now or in the future. Over time, construction has gone from being quite wasteful to leading the way. Especially in the last 20 years, the impact of industry on the environment and climate change has been brought to the front of people’s minds. Construction and its suppliers and manufacturers have changed the climate. Through sustainable practice, you can begin to slow the damage being done and maybe turn around some aspects altogether.

Sustainability and BIM have a lot in common; just think about the following:

• Knowing where things come from: Being able to confirm that the forest from which timber was sourced uses ethical principles or that power is drawn from renewable energy schemes is essential to modern construction projects. BIM processes handle information to ensure that it’s accurate and responsive to change. A key example is in product information and being able to quickly interrogate the information model to find out all the relevant parameters of an object, including its source and its environmental properties.
• Understanding industry schemes: To support sustainable sourcing and design, schemes like BREEAM (www.breeam.org), LEED (www.usgbc.org/leed), Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) (www.pefc.org), and the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) (https://us.fsc.org) are required. Organizations like WRAP (www.wrap.org.uk) offer advice and guidance on limiting waste. In the same way, BIM industry schemes, mandates, and standards are needed to ensure everyone is heading in the same direction. At a detailed level, you need to understand the documents, frameworks, and standards that indicate how project teams can achieve the targets; sometimes they can take a long time to be produced or to be transparent and explained. Hopefully, this book can help you start.
• Changing the culture: A lot of waste was due to cultural factors; for example, the effort of sorting demolition waste that others could reuse versus just throwing it all into a skip. To change that attitude, site workers needed information on the importance of recycling where possible and the impact on the environment. BIM is going to require organizations to provide the same level of information across all levels of the industry, to educate on the benefits of new BIM processes; otherwise the adoption could fail at ground level.
• Cooperating in design: The industry knew for a long time that waste was a huge problem. Take, for example, the vast amount of offcuts in plasterboard and timber. Often, this was due to design dimensions that didn’t make use of standard sizes and required a lot of cutting on-site. Design and build contracts where contractor teams were brought onto the project at an early stage changed this, because the teams had a much clearer idea of buildability issues. Asking the design teams to keep to standard product dimensions as much as possible reduces wastage. BIM takes this idea a step further, ensuring that the entire team knows the exact quantities and dimensions in the model environment. Buildability issues are displayed clearly, allowing for refinement of the design to reduce waste and make for an easier build.
• Impacting the entire supply chain: In any construction project, you’re one link in a huge chain of processes and people. The nationwide drivers of environmental awareness and personal responsibility encouraged the drive for sustainability in construction. Whether it’s wasteful packaging, damaged components from poor site management, or demolition waste, everyone on the project timeline has an opportunity to make a difference. Appreciating that you’re part of something much, much bigger is so important in BIM. Everyone is in this together. As procurement gets faster, just-in-time delivery of exactly the required amount of each material will generate huge efficiencies.

BIM is a solution to lots of material inefficiencies and communication problems that result in abortive, wasteful work. In fact, lots of BIM best practice aims to help sustainable construction, including solving the performance gap where real-life performance just doesn’t match the estimated performance of the design. Check out Chapter 15 for more on sustainability.

In the UK, the Construction Industrial Strategy includes a commitment to lower CO₂ emissions by 50 percent by 2025. The UK government sees BIM as a key part to making that reduction a reality. Making the construction industry more sustainable didn’t happen overnight, and the industry still has a long way to go. Construction remains one of the largest contributors to waste generation, responsible for up to half of what goes to landfill. Change relies on policy, performance, people, and protocols all gradually evolving.

A 2010 report by the contractor/developer Willmott Dixon includes an estimate of global pollution that can be attributed to buildings. The report suggests that 23 percent of air pollution in cities is from buildings and that 50 percent of climate change gases and ozone depletion is due to buildings. That means half of the impact humans have had on the environment is directly linked to buildings. The report also lists estimated resources used in buildings — for example, 90 percent of hardwoods are cut down for use in buildings, along with half of all the water and energy the world uses.

Impacting with disruptive technology

The key with disruptive innovation is that the existing surrounding industry is affected and eventually replaced by the new idea. The opposite is sustaining improvements, which are more like an evolution of an existing technology. Through sustaining improvements businesses compete with one another in making things better and better.

Predicting how long an innovation will take to be adopted can be difficult. Disruptive inventions that change the way people live and work, like the cellphone or computer mouse, can take around 20 to 30 years to reach common usage. But devices for entertainment or media consumption, like CD players, cassette players, and televisions, were adopted much faster, sometimes in less than five years.

Have you heard the term early adopter before? It comes from a man called Everett Rogers. One of his many theories was called the diffusion of innovations. He suggested that you could divide groups of consumers into categories based on their willingness to adopt an innovation, and that these groups follow a bell-shaped curve distribution.

This same idea can be applied to BIM by using some common alternative terms for the same groups:

• Technologists: When was the first time you heard about BIM or virtual construction? A pioneering few innovators have been trying to encourage new digital systems and processes in a paper-obsessed industry for decades. Often they have just been expensive oddities, like early automobile inventors’ attempts to make a steam-powered car.
• Visionaries: Some companies have been instrumental in leading the way with BIM, implementing their own way of working, sometimes on huge projects. The rest of the industry was only just hearing about its potential from example case studies and media stories. Computing power was still an expensive investment. You can think of this like the first gasoline cars, which took decades of development before there was really a market for them.
• The tipping point: We think that this is where the industry is right now, with more companies seeing a return on investment, their clients imposing requirements, and more countries imposing BIM mandates. This is BIM’s Henry Ford moment. Ford was able to use assembly line techniques to make cars affordable. BIM is no longer an eccentric, expensive idea; it’s now in mass production.
• Pragmatists: Reading this book is a great start. As part of the early majority, you’re set to take advantage of all the lessons from the uncertain days of BIM implementation and act on your organization’s unique situation. This book forms part of the infrastructure. Think of past experience like the improved roads and supply of fuel in gas stations that cars need, along with rules and regulations, which describe the best, safest ways to use a new technology.
• Conservatives: BIM will become completely commonplace, an assumed foundation for all design activities, site, and construction methods and asset operation. The vast majority will follow best-practice data management simply because doing the opposite means wasting time and money. You’ll have as many tools for information control as you have currently for drawing. Just as car producers keep improving performance and providing variety, so the BIM market will respond to inefficiency with new solutions and bespoke options.
• Sceptics: As with any technology, some will long for the old days and will begrudgingly use newer processes because they have to. Some of the later adopters, especially the very young, may think of a better way of doing things and become… .
• The new innovators: What happens after BIM? What will disrupt it? Nobody really knows! But you can be certain that people will continue to innovate and that technology will always move forward. Just look at the evolution of electric cars and self-driving technology. We predict that BIM will evolve too, and you can read more about that in Chapter 19.

We also cover the BIM adoption curve in far more detail in Chapter 12.

Being mobile, seeing more

One of the major ways that the construction industry has been disrupted has been by increased mobility. Perhaps you carry a smartphone or a tablet and you send emails or make business calls with that device. Maybe you’re drawing sketches or writing reports during your daily commute. How do you communicate with your colleagues? Always face to face, by email, or by phone? Do you use video conferencing tools like Skype, GoToMeeting, or FaceTime?

You can quickly see that you don’t need to be tied to your desk in order to do these activities. Not only are more people working from home, but you can also send a message from the construction site, from a hotel, or in transit on the other side of the world. Can you see how this frees up the industry to work differently? That’s what we mean by disruptive technology, things that appear to come out of nowhere and revolutionize the way you live or work.

Just think about what this means for site work. If you see a mistake or an issue crops up on-site, you can quickly call up any aspect of the virtual information model to compare it, communicate it, or change it as necessary. The increased mobility of the industry makes for rapid connections and on-the-fly instructions.

This is a double-edged sword. If someone on the project team needs an answer, you may have to think and respond more quickly than you want to. Don’t rush into decisions because you feel pressured. Tell people if you need more time to consider your answer.

In this hyper-connected world, don’t forget to have a life outside of work too. At some time, we’ve all been told off for checking our work cellphones when we should have been on vacation.

Disrupting through investment

Disruptive technology often shuts down an existing part of an industry, but the new innovation quickly becomes a really competitive market full of commercial opportunity. You’ll probably have noticed that the BIM marketplace is already full of companies, consultants, and providers who are fighting for the largest opportunities and who see BIM as a potentially lucrative investment.

As part of all this disruption and evolution in the industry, you’ll likely see more mergers and acquisitions in the largest contracting, property management and facility management (FM) operation companies. This is a quick way for a company to offer BIM services. More organizations are choosing to grow their offering of skills and the areas they serve by acquiring the existing experts and market leaders.

Just think of the scale of research and development that goes into pharmaceuticals and medicine. A nearly unimaginable level of financial and time investment goes into the development of a new drug or treatment, which is gradually recouped in the cost to the market, whether governments or hospitals. It’s not so much of a stretch to imagine one of these new giant super-contractors investing similar levels of money in developing a ground-breaking building method or, through project experience and virtual modeling, coming to an unprecedented understanding about the performance of a particular building type and dominating the market in its construction.

Taking a long-term view

The sheer amount of data being generated by a digital construction industry will reveal a huge amount of lessons in a very short space of time. People will be able to analyze the problems faced by the industry, some of which were invisible to everyone involved. That means some technology will take a while to evolve as it becomes clear where it could help the most.

As we suggest throughout this book, take the long view. In every decision you’re making, consider what you’re hoping to achieve in the next 5, 10, 20 years as a representative of the construction industry (for example, maybe you want sites to have zero fatalities and injuries), as individual businesses (perhaps you want to reduce your environmental impact), and as an individual (you want to construct a lunar base!).

Providing a modular kit of parts

If you have an interest in architectural history, you may have heard of Georgian-era pattern books. Similar to a catalogue of design options, pattern books were a way for local builders to gain access to architectural design, because the drawings were published for mass readership. These pattern books contained potential designs for various building types, but especially houses, from quaint cottages to grand townhouses and mansions. By copying these standard plans and allowing for a little adaptation, you could almost guarantee quality in design.

Taking this idea a few steps further, what if you weren’t just buying plans that were standardized for quality, but could source pre-built modules for entire buildings? The technology for off-site manufacture (OSM) has been around for hundreds of years. Stories exist of houses being shipped from the UK to Australia as a kit of parts and of a whole hospital built in shipbuilding docks and sent to Turkey during the Crimean War. House kits were very popular in the United States during the early 1900s, such as the Sears, Roebuck & Co. model that had 30,000 parts!

You may be more familiar with the term prefabrication or prefab. Prefab sometimes gets a bad reputation. Generally, people have used it in response to a need for fast housing for huge populations, like during or after wartime when housing shortages occur. The priority was often speed, which meant many were cheap and poorly constructed, resulting in leaks and thermal inefficiency. In the UK in 1968, a tower block partially collapsed after poor construction gave way in a gas explosion. Sadly, those memories linger for many people and a cynicism exists about prefabrication.

Now, though, the very traditional industry we keep talking about is changing and beginning to embrace the idea of modern construction technology, helped by the new virtual modeling techniques to perfect OSM in a factory environment.

Designing for manufacture and assembly

The factory environment of other clean manufacturing industries is exactly the kind of image that promoters of OSM believe can revolutionize construction. From precast concrete units of any shape to entire timber-frame wall elements with pre-fitted windows, doors, and interior finishes, the 3D information model contains the need for data fabricators and contractors to produce accurate replicas of the designer’s intentions, sometimes directly milling, cutting, or manufacturing the components from the design model. Where more accurate fabrication data is required, systems can coordinate with robotic machinery to communicate precise detail. The best success seems to come from using the accuracy of the manufacturing process as a driver for better design.

Boothroyd Dewhurst, Inc. trademarked the term designing for manufacture and assembly (DfMA) to describe this refinement of design prior to production, but it has become commonplace terminology in modern construction. By optimizing the design of an output, you find its manufacture, assembly on-site, and eventual maintenance or deconstruction much simpler than with traditional methods. DfMA aims to do the following:

• Reduce manual labor. The industry still makes a lot of people do physical, manual work that leads to injury or long-term health problems, including disability. Robotics and assembly line machinery can do hazardous or difficult jobs instead of requiring people to do them. Some projects have reduced on-site labor by more than 80 percent.
• Reduce emissions and increase sustainability. By designing to reduce waste, the assembly line uses only the necessary amount of any material. Project teams can optimize sizes to any dimension and assemble components to fit perfectly. BIM considers the environmental impact throughout the lifetime of a component. Designers can work with fabricators to test performance of building products exactly, unlike in site work, where the reality of untidy work may not be capable of matching the expected thermal or acoustic design properties. Imagine building a door in a factory, where any gaps and airflows can be precisely sealed up by machinery, in comparison to making the door on-site with manual tools.
• Increase quality and consistency. Site processes are typically difficult to replicate time after time. Assembly line and factory technology reproduces exact copies of a design millions of times over. Think about the unprecedented levels of specification that DfMA can guarantee. What does this mean for quality assurance? Over time, you’ll notice an effect on warranties and insurance. Also, if you encounter problems on-site, you improve the design and every future component benefits from the change.
• Increase speed of production. With assembly lines you’re not reliant on one aspect of a job to be finished before starting your own. Each one of the many components in the factory can be at any stage of the assembly process, so a constant flow of completed products exists. Not to mention, you don’t have to worry about the weather! On-site, the speed of construction also increases. Some reports suggest savings of up to 50 percent on project schedules by using OSM systems.
• Reduce risk of injury or accident. An increase in reliance on machines to do unsafe work reduces the danger for site teams. See the later section “Making construction safer” for more information.

One of the key aims is to reduce the number of parts necessary to achieve something. The best example is instead of having to install six batteries to power a radio, have only one battery pack containing the equivalent power. For buildings, this is like having a bathroom pod that contains pre-installed units and basins to be dropped into the building whole, requiring only plumbing connections on-site. An astonishing example of this is the pre-fabricated buildings for new McDonald’s restaurants. Using pre-prepared ground foundations, an entire modular McDonald’s was recently installed in just 13 hours from start to finish.

You can recognize the benefits of OSM only if the installation on-site is successful. In general, you need specialist teams to guarantee precise execution of the works. Alternatively, traditional site workers need to be trained in new skills to deal with pods and pre-fabricated elements.

The UK is considered to be leading the OSM industry, and one of the companies immediately seeing the benefits of DfMA is Laing O’Rourke, through their Explo’re OSM facility.

OSM and DfMA won’t necessarily be able to replicate all traditional site processes and construction methods. Many of the early examples are concrete based and form standardized components like columns, beams, and planks. Replicating and automating brick or exposed-timber construction to a high quality can be very difficult.

Managing new site processes

DfMA and OSM aim to reduce the scale and schedule of on-site construction. If you can achieve more in the clean, quality-controlled factory, then you spend less time on dirty sites at the mercy of the climate.

Another significant benefit of OSM is the reduction in needing to transport raw materials. OSM means that you don’t encounter the awkward logistics of moving steel beams and long pieces of timber around a construction site; you can use manageable pre-built components.

Chapter 3 discusses how radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags can be used to track the delivery, location, and use of every single component as an information model. As this technology becomes more commonplace, contractors will be able to understand the supply and demand of construction materials like never before. Real-time data will increase, informing decisions and accelerating reactions.

By using the rule-sets developed from designs, the transactions between supplier, contractor, and client will become instantaneous. The recent BIM 2050/CIC report “Built Environment 2050” calls this “nanosecond procurement.” This has a huge impact on the industry’s ability to deliver buildings of exceptional quality to a precise schedule.

Making construction safer

Many site activities are very dangerous, so if OSM can bring those hazardous methods into the controlled factory environment, construction becomes much safer. Having to conduct dangerous activities at height and in high winds, wet conditions, or extreme temperatures makes them significantly worse.

Improving the quality of construction also reduces risk to the end user. Because a contractor can sign off the end product before leaving the factory, testing and commissioning to ensure user safety in the completed facility becomes much easier.

Don’t forget that construction becomes safer as soon as the industry starts building digitally. Understanding or interpreting potential hazards and risks from paper drawings and printed Gantt charts can be difficult (refer to Chapter 16 for more information). Having the information model means that the project team can interrogate it in 4D (scheduling) to watch for potential clashes in activity, such as working with heavy elements at height while work is taking place on the ground below, or seeing where harness and fall protection will be necessary. Some also say that BIM’s greatest legacy will be reducing site deaths to zero. See Chapter 16 for much more on BIM for health and safety (Stefan’s favorite subject!).