Essential Handbook: Guide to the Connected Construction Site

• Turn to page 3 to find out how much more revenue your business could make with the right technology
• Find out on page 4 how much faster intelligent construction will make your project completion
• Page 6 tells you why you need a Digital Twin for your business now

Safer working, higher productivity

Co-ordinating such a vast undertaking is understandably difficult, with many different partners and individuals needing to provide design input, manage installation and delivery, monitor conditions during construction and ensure what’s delivered is exactly what was ordered – on time, on budget and with no accidents or downtime.

The construction sector is well-known for its high risk of injury and even fatal accidents. WorkSafe reported 2,746 work-related injuries or illnesses across the New Zealand construction industry in 2018, as well as six fatalities. In the first six months of 2019, 11 Kiwi construction workers were killed.

“Having so many moving parts on site, it can be a real challenge to monitor what’s happening and which people are where at any given moment. This makes communication difficult, which leads to health and safety and compliance issues,” says Chris Hunter, a director at NZ Strong. “Every site manager wants to be able to provide a safe working environment for their team without compromising performance.”

Additional challenges are added by the fact New Zealand’s construction sector is booming, with the number of cranes in Auckland outstripping any city in the US according to figures released by the RLB Crane Index in April 2019. There’s no sign of it slowing down either – new building work is at record levels, rising 6.8 per cent in 2018. As well as ensuring workers’ safety, the pressure is on construction companies to optimise their operations, so they can deliver new buildings faster. Poor communication and responsiveness is also a factor here.

“A lot of time can be wasted waiting for equipment to arrive, working out exactly where something should be installed, fixing errors or filling out paperwork. And in any project, delays cost money. While the material waste generated on building sites is a significant issue, inefficiency is just as big a problem,” Hunter says.

What next for connected construction?

Once Wynyard 100 is built, Burton says the digital twin and smart sensors will continue to provide cost-efficiencies for the owner.

Shirley Strachan, Asia Pacific General Manager of IoT Device Experience at Microsoft, agrees.

“When we think about the ability to bring in IoT that early in the process of a building development, it really sets us up to operationalise and manage that building once it’s completed as well and if there are issues later with the building, to be able to work out where those issues came in and therefore how to mitigate those issues,” she says.

Typically, New Zealand practitioners of Building Information Modelling (BIM) focus on the design phase, ignoring the ongoing operation of the building once the keys are handed over. According to an EBOSS survey, less than a third of industry members used BIM for asset and facilities management in 2018, compared with around nine in ten using it for design.

The Wynyard 100 project is different, with the platform containing information on asset warranties so it can send reminders for building owners to replace worn-out components as they near the end of their lives. Having a digital, geolocated twin of the building will also ensure information from foundation to roof is kept in one place.

“We’ve worked on projects such as hospitals and airports where vital information about pipes or old building structures has been lost over the years, and there’s no one source of truth. This means when major renovations are planned, they basically have to “dig and see”,” says Burton. “In the future, that whole scenario can be avoided with a virtual blueprint in the cloud which is completely accurate in terms of location on the site.”