TECHNOLOGY: RESHAPING INDIA

Technology plays a critical role in how businesses function today. Prajakta Karnik speaks to industry players to understand the latest technogies adopted in the infrastructure industry and how that has brought a paradigm shift in the process and revolutionized it.

Technology has played a pivotal role in shaping the businesses of today. Gone are the days when technology was used to complement in certain areas of operations. Today, technology has taken a lead in all the spheres of business operations. From conceptualization and ideation to designing, scheduling work, management, tracking execution process, delivery and service support, technology is the driver.

Moreover, when it comes to the infrastructure and construction industries, it plays an even more critical role in exploring and analysing data, increasing overall productivity, reducing economic impact, improving operational efficiency and providing a safer environment for people working on the project site.

The most common technologies that are being used today in the construction industry are:

• Building Information Modelling (BIM)
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• Machine Learning (ML)
• Virtual Reality (VR)
• Augmented Reality (AR)
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Importance of Technology Adoption

India is at the cusp of infrastructure development. India plans to spend USD 1.4 trillion on infrastructure between 2019 to 2023. This infra boost is expected to drive the growth of tech industry.

BIM, ERP, Virtual Reality, etc are a collection of path-breaking platforms, tools & technologies that have changed the way the current construction & infrastructure industry thinks, evolves & executes projects, opined Pratap Dhopte, Managing Director, Excelize.

"These technologies allow clients, consultants, contractors, customer involved in the project to visualize, create optimal systems & processes, and experience the entirety of a project at the design conception or realisation stages itself. These are poised to become key drivers in optimization of project costs, mitigation of risks during execution and also contribute to a large extent in decision making for clients before investing in large scale ventures & projects," he added.

According to Alexandre Pommier, Country Manager - India, Novade, the construction and infrastructure sector are building safer, stronger and more energy-efficient structures because of technology, with many contemporary solutions boosting levels of innovation.

"Adopting new technology helps the sector grow and evolve. However, the importance of matching technology choices with an organisation's business strategy is often overlooked. First and foremost, technology is a business tool. If the solution doesn't support and enable an organisation's agenda, it will fall short of expectations. Organisations that successfully align technology to business strategy take the time to identify key business drivers, assess their IT maturity, prioritise initiatives, and evaluate implementation options. The construction and infrastructure sector is also investigating and exploiting technologies from other industries, like manufacturing. The recent pandemic has intensified the search for innovations as businesses actively seek new ways to be more competitive," he added.

Umesh Pai, Managing Director, EPLAN Software & Services opined that in construction and infrastructure industry, technology has to be adopted by the whole ecosystem. "If only a part of ecosystem adopts advancements technology, the benefits would be minimal in terms of usage/adoption of the data in terms of utility. So, it's critical that all players involved be it the end user, the EPC contractor, equipment supplier or the component supplier adopt the technology and there lies our challenge. To convince the complete ecosystem is not easy as the use case of each would be different. However, that's an opportunity as well for us," Pai said.

Speaking about the importance of BIM technology Wrench Solutions CEO, Varghese Daniel, noted, "When a construction project is going on, an owner is viewing the project remotely an he wants to know what has been planned to be done on a weekly basis, and what has actually been done. Visualization of the actual progress gives a lot of confidence to the customer,  and that he can monitor the project from any location."

Highlighting that technology can rule out the inefficiencies and risks that plague the building industry, Gautam Tiwari, Co-creator, Trezi said that presently, only about 30% of the projects are completed on time or within the allotted budget. As such, about 10% of the project value is at risk of loss.

"This is primarily due to poorly organized workflows and a large amount of variance caused by individual interpretation of data.

The present scenario relies on physical mock-ups and on-site proto-typing to gain a close approximation of the end product. These are time-intensive, resource-heavy, and require extensive back and forth between the building team and the suppliers. This not only extends the project timeline, but also restricts the building team in terms of choice - whether of the material (by physical proximity), or by the manufacturer (by acquaintanceship)," he said.

Tiwari further noted that without reliable means to test out possible design, material or product options, building teams cannot possibly expand their scope without running the risk of delays and errors - which causes resources at hand to go underutilized. In this scenario, it is imperative that data processing be based on visualization rather than interpretation.

Sagar Deshmukh, Associate Director of LEA-India (LEA Associates South Asia) opined that developing world has to adopt the advanced technologies much faster when thriving for the quality infrastructure as infrastructure development is key to the growth as well as the sustenance.

"Rather towards enhancing quality of life with state-of-the art infrastructure, it becomes more than crucial to embrace technology and adapt it quickly. Towards enabling tech-driven approach across the infrastructure industry, we need to pursue demonstration, penetration and wider acceptance for bringing the change," he added.

Seeing from the user perspective, L&T's digital transformation has been a concerted and conscious effort to transform from a traditional, brick and mortar organization into an agile, contemporary, and asset-light conglomerate using technology.

"Widespread digitalization has significantly enhanced efficiencies in all core operations involving men, machinery, design & engineering, geographical surveys, materials, logistics, maintenance, field execution, labour workforce, quality, safety, documentation, customer relations and much more. It has improved productivity, saved costs, cut wastage, and thereby reduced execution time which is a win-win situation for both customer/client and contractor," an L&T spokesperson said.

Benefits 

McKinsey's Global Industry Digitisation Index ranks construction as the second least digitised industry in the world, just ahead of agriculture at the bottom of the table. In one of its studies, McKinsey estimates that 98% of megaprojects suffer cost overruns of more than 30% and an average delay of 20 months behind original schedule.

Technologies help in bringing the team together to make more accurate decisions than just ballparks. "These are tools for better visualization and data collection, but the communication of these data with the teams still needs to take place so that the information actually gets used. Virtual reality is mostly used for post-completion these days. ERP also has a lot of use post-completion as it is used for marketing the products that have been made. The other software such as BIM are helpful during the designing and construction process," Yukti Arora, Co-Founder and CPO, Buildsys said.

According to Dhopte the benefits of adopting different technologies result in greater efficiency and output, optimized project lifecycle with higher yield at reduced costs and reduces errors which further extends to reduce delays in the project cycle.

"Apart from these, seamless communication with limited or no data discrepancies creates global repositories for easy access. It also ensures resource optimization and control over overall project costs with increased profit margins," he added.

Elaborating further on the benefits, Pommier noted that technology can influence every aspect of the construction process, from design right through to the ongoing maintenance of facilities. Some of the benefits include having access to real time information to make more informed decisions, digitising information reduces manual errors and duplication, speeds up activities, reduces complexity, and leads to better tracking of data and decision making.

With the amount of focus and investment this segment is attracting, there is a huge pressure on three basic aspects viz, time, cost and quality. "All stakeholders would critically look at the cost of the project, time that is needed for execution and quality that is expected. The project execution companies would look for good planning tools, good documentation and communication tools, equipment suppliers would look for good engineering and manufacturing tools along with good documentation and the end user would be looking for a solid quality of data which they can use both in their digitalization projects as well as in maintenance," Pai said.

Highlighting the benefits of different technology tools, Daniel explained:

• BIM: When a design is in 2D, I have to “imagine” the 2D drawings into 3D, which creates its own problems of ‘interrupting', meaning, if any party involved in the project wants to share a feedback or a change, that change is captured in the initial stage itself, and when there is a change, owners/contractors can see what is the impact in terms of budget. So the full impact of the changes can be assessed and finalised using 3D. In
• IoT: This is very useful in the maintenance of construction projects. The various sensors and relays are connected to Internet,  it will help operate the finished project based on the surroundings. This helps reduce human intervention and chances of failures. 
• Virtual Reality: This technology takes it to a new level by making it possible for people to immerse themselves in the project as though they were actually there and to interact with the environment exactly as though engaged in a walk-through. Teams on opposite sides of the country can now “walk through” a site together and examine its details in real time, thanks to this new technology.
• ERP : With ERP, we get real-time and accurate information enabling day-to-day business activities and an easy flow of data.

Challenges

According to Raj Darji, Founder & CEO Aarav Solutions, the operation dynamics of the real estate business in India are evolving and innovating at a pace much faster than envisioned, it is almost imperative that innovations be applied to the most basic as well as most important step in the value chain - construction techniques.

"A major challenge observed is lack of transparency across real-estate management processes of pre-sales, sales and after sales services, material management and finance due to organisations using various proprietary applications which are not integrated, without any automated features. Some of the major challenges faced by real estate players are lack of single system to provide complete view of multitude of properties spread across a vast geographical location and catering to various strata of society. The industry is based on legacy system where each department is working in silo resulting in lack of as a lack of communication across departments, organization hierarchy and regions. From a customer perspective, there is lack of information about properties, status of upcoming or developing property schemes, loan settlement, balance payment view, process on property registration and no automated communication channel to share their issues. High business risks due to unavailability of information, no data correlation and dearth of accountability are some of the other major challenges in the real estate sector today," he said.

Echoing similar concerns, Tiwari said the AEC industry has traditionally shied away from leveraging technological aids for its workflows and processes, leading to fragmentation and delays.

"Every stakeholder has individual work patterns and software choices and, therefore, collaborations are often highly dependent on physical interactions. One such partnership is between designers and building product manufacturers that can get tedious and time-intensive due to slow feedback and execution, little awareness regarding products and a lack of industry-specific marketing media. These problems have been amplified by the current pandemic and pose real challenges to creating an optimum way forward. Therefore, the adoption of technological tools and platforms is not just essential to tackle the current pandemic but to also create an optimal and efficient way forward," he added.

Lower Adoption of Technology

Infrastructure patrons are aware about technologies but seems they are cautious. In recent years, with the FDI in the infrastructure sector, many foreign players brought in the latest technology. At the same time, domestic players have shown they are also not shying away from investing in technology for better results. But such kind of attempts are falling under smaller umbrella of innovative piloting.

"Certainly promoting and adopting technology solutions, it needs to spread wings much wider. If not late, this is the time to embrace the technology, promote and demonstrate with larger scale, the real time benefits. Without any doubt, our country have seen transformation in last couple of decades with newer tools and techniques. The industry is having appetite to change. Demand for quality infrastructure is high. Technology can be the only saviour," Deshmukh said.

According to Arora, India has embraced such new technologies to a great extent but there are still many challenges to overcome if we want to shift to complete digitisation. BIM, for instance, is being adopted quite well in the south. ERP and Virtual Reality are also used in the Indian construction industry these days, mostly in the sales and post-completion aspect.

"However, during the construction phase, builders are usually not involved and, therefore, are hesitant in investing in such software. Additionally, companies that are involved in contracting and in project management are still much more comfortable with paperwork and excel spreadsheets making them more used to traditional methods rather than adopting newer technologies. To integrate such software more coherently, a change needs to be brought about and it needs to come from the user level. This requires a lot of effort for somebody to bring the entire team together on one platform," she added.

The reason for low penetration of technologies being adopted in India is mostly due to comfort and familiarity with traditional practices. Most people do not want to depend completely on technology as there is a concern for job security and a sense of feeling that they would go obsolete if too much technology comes in. Hesitancy based on security of data is another reason why such software are still not widely embraced. People always question if their data is going to be secure as a lot of private and confidential information is being shared on a daily basis. They have doubts and want servers in their control rather than on the cloud.

Tiwari noted that tech adoption remains a perennial challenge in the building industry, within India and worldwide. "The usual Indian mindset tends to be complacent towards technology. We don't accept change too readily, this has been the case with VR as well - people do not fully understand it, as they may have never fully experienced it. As an India-based start-up, we must also contend with taxation structures, incorporation delays and other funding-related problems. Another significant challenge that we face is in the area of establishing appropriate sales processes for an experiential product while keeping customer acquisition costs manageable."

L&T spokesperson said that new ways of functioning have opened moving business operations from tedious, manual compilation of data to acting on data captured in real time that throw up insights on visually rich and intuitive dashboards for company & project leadership to make predictive analysis and take informed decisions. "Digital technologies have tremendous scope to be applied across the entire value chain of an infrastructure project, right from pre bid surveys right up to O&M," the spokesperson added.

Government Support

To bring the change, integrated tech-lead-infrastructure will yield real value. More tech-oriented policy thrust, promoting technology oriented change management, evaluation & accreditation may be seen as opportunity areas to work upon, Deshmukh noted.

"Softer solutions and infrastructure going hand in hand will not only prove as complementing and supplementing each other's but it is likely to prove as no less than the big economic booster," he said.

Dhopte opined that the government should come out with a comprehensive policy for the adoption of new technologies starting with BIM to bring efficiencies and transparencies in public construction and infrastructure projects similar to the UK mandate for BIM.

"The UK government mandated BIM in April 2016 in every construction project which requires that all projects funded by central government be delivered with ‘fully collaborative 3D BIM’. As the mandate has come into force, there has been a rise in levels of BIM adoption," he said.

Echoing similar views Arora noted that government should  ensure that the compliance and policies allow for a smoother integration and do not put obstacles in the path of technology adoption.

"The government does not have to create tenders that specify the need to use technology but instead create policies and remove compliance hurdles when it comes to adoption of technology. The initiative is also less on the government side once the policies are in place but more on the private sector. The government is definitely trying to go digital and promote overall digitisation especially after Covid-19. A general awareness of technology and adoption at the government level will also encourage the private sectors to go digital," she said.

Tiwari also opined that even as foreign players enter the Indian building industry and entire towns are built from scratch across the country, we are lagging behind on taking up crucial systems that can organize our efforts and reduce inefficiencies in the way we design, build, and maintain our built environment.

"Therefore, it is vital for the government to create mandates to ensure the use of technology for a error free, and sustainable way forward. The change must come from the top of the system to reduce wasteful and error prone methods. We can expect a steady increase in adoption rates as Immersive Tech gains momentum. Data Visualization is set to gain predominance over interpretation as penetration of the technology increases across user bases. I hope to also see VR becoming a standard for all construction projects - with an HMD  (Head Mounted Device) available at every project site to plan, foresee and troubleshoot. Perhaps, in the long run, HMDs  can replace computers entirely," he added.

Way Forward

The construction and infrastructure industries still have a long way to go in the adoption of new technologies such as BIM, ERP, VR and IoT. A few pioneering companies in the sector have started implementing these in their day-to-day construction activities. However, widespread adoption is needed for these technologies to impact the industry, Prateek Arora, Co-Founder and CTO, Buildsys noted.

As Arora sums up, "As the operation dynamic of the construction sector in India evolves and innovates, it is almost imperative that innovations be applied to construction management as well.

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