Future of Construction Industry – Walking the roads of Digitization

The construction and infrastructure industry has grown exponentially in the recent years and we’re not blind to this growth or it’s future. The results are shockingly BIG and right in front of our eyes every time we leave the house. Highly expansive roads, buildings with shapes we could only dream of and the infrastructure overall feels so rich and tasteful. Nobody wants to settle for “basic” anymore. Everyone wants their creativity to run wild these days.

So how does the construction industry bring this creativity to life and meet demand? The old way.

All that climbing up only to jump down again. Seriously like, this industry embraced every single industrial revolution with open arms up until now – when it’s time for the Digital Age. This industry has expensive machinery, improved tools and vehicles with the latest technology to do their bidding! And if I’m honest, these additions help their business greatly.

So this begs the question of “Why the Construction Industry is so hesitant to catch up with the digital age?” Because let me tell you what I think – it’s great! Everything is faster, controllable, accessible and scalable to no end, however it’s an uncharted territory for the industry.

But I’m not going to bore you by presenting any unproven numerical data in order to convince you. Rather, I’ll show you how much of an impact digitization has on the day to day activities of an industry leader, enter – Larsen & Toubro

Larsen & Toubro – The Building Blocks of Complexity

Larsen & Toubro Construction, India’s largest construction organization and ranked among the world’s top 30 contractors, has been transforming cityscapes and landscapes with structures of immense size and grandeur for the past seven decades. The company’s capabilities span the entire gamut of construction – Heavy Civil, Transportation, Smart World, Communication, Power, etc – and its services extend to all core sector industries and infrastructure projects.

As big as the organization of Larsen & Toubro is, not all of it is under one roof. Simply put, L&T is a huge organization but there’s still improvements they can make, especially with all the field activities for one of their IC – L&T Transport and Infrastructure(TI).

Moving Hurdles to Make Paths – The Transformation

We know that construction is not an easy business by any means. In the case of L&T TI, long roadworks became a problem. Since roadworks are different than standard construction projects as they are tricky and longer than your average construction site. There’s also a lot of paperwork and slow communication involved for all the RFI of the chainages on roads.

The Site Engineers raised these RFI(Request for Inspection) quite often during ongoing construction. But, the Site Engineers could not just raise the RFI and get to their work. They first needed to raise them and send the raised RFI to their Internal Team for approval. If approved, then and only then can the Site Engineers begin with their work.

Now you can imagine how much time this process would actually consume in the day-to-day activities of a construction site. It just isn’t suitable to have this many RFI raised, reviewed and approved regularly. It consumes too much of one’s time.

The Turning Point

We saw a problem and pitched L&T TI with our digital solution Pro-Inspector. It is a tool that automates field audits, inspections, safety walks and work permits with it’s rich checklist engine and dynamic reporting. The in-built camera feature really helps with gathering evidence of non conformities . It helps you monitor and track the performances of your sites and helps you make decisions very quickly.

With Pro-Inspector, team L&T were able to minimize their time consumption by a lot. Since all the RFI were now raised over the cloud, the Planning Team was easily able to approve all of them and send them to the clients with one click! The same goes for the approval cycle. When the RFI got approved, the Site Engineers would be notified via Push Notifications immediately so that they may get to work without any delays. The automation of this entire process helped out L&T TI exponentially and saved many work hours.

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Team L&T understood the need to embrace digitization and welcomed Pro-Inspector with open arms. Now it helps them run a hassle-free business while also providing an edge over other competitors without having to spend a lot of money. They have put all those saved work-hours to good use.

Then versus Now

Before Digitization

Piles and piles of Paperwork to go through that consumed a lot of time.
Slow Communication would consume a lot of time.
Reporting and resolving any discrepancies or non conformity took a lot of time.
All checklists used were repetitive and didn’t portray good statistics.
Periodic inspections were taking a lot of time to get approved, productivity was lost.

After Digitization

All checklists are executed digitally so there’s no need to use paper.
RFI would be raised, reviewed and approved on cloud, therefore saving tons of time.
Non conformity are identified and tracked to closure in minimal time.
All checklists are dynamic and yield highly informative statistics.
40% more inspections done and 75% increase in productivity is observed.

From all this, it is understood that the construction industry will only go forward from here on. So, if you don’t want to fall off when it does, just hold onto Pro Inspector, it’ll help!