The question is not whether the Digital Transformation is coming to the construction industry, but when, and how to best to embrace it. How do you get people on board? Where does one begin? Here are some insights.

Digital Transformation is a perennial topic across industries, with analysts and market leaders again kicking off the year with significant attention devoted to the latest trends in Digital Transformation: powerful analytics, artificial intelligence, accessibility, etc. While the construction industry lags other sectors in digitization, these trends are nonetheless beginning to surface in the industry as companies move forward carefully with digital transformation. While a few companies (primarily new market entrants) set high standards for digital construction in 2017, 2018 is emerging as the year a large number of industry incumbents take concrete steps to advance their own Digital Transformation. Here are a few of the reasons it is important to take action now, and some steps you can take to jump start your initiative.

At FINALCAD, we aim to change the way we build. We have already digitized the architectural work progress enabling issues management, form usage for quality controls and tasks advancement follow-up thanks to our mobile and tablet field apps. This allowed all stakeholders involved in a building or an infrastructure to collaborate more efficiently. Today, we’re taking it a step further by changing the way structural work is done and how progress is tracked on a construction site.

Construction projects are increasingly incorporating systems of digital sensors, intelligent machines, mobile devices, and new software applications – integrated with a central platform of Building Information Modelling (BIM). BIM identifies potential design clashes and constructibility issues at the design and engineering stage, thereby averting costly corrective rework.

Know your priorities. For building construction, it is critical to supervise each single activity on site rather than spend too much time on documentation work in office. FINALCAD mobile app helps supervisors and engineers from Shimizu Corporation allocate more time on the field, rather than stuck in office doing paperwork.