Digital Disruption In Construction Equipment Space

In today’s world when emerging technologies such as robots, 3D printing and drones are changing or disrupting every industry, the construction and mining equipment sector is yet to witness any large scale product or process disruption.

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Historically the construction and mining industry has been known to be innately conservative with low margins thereby reducing the investment in research and in embracing ‘process innovation’ in the sector. The last few years have proved otherwise – the smartphone revolution, the accessibility of internet for all and the government’s push to digitisation has propelled this indispensable transition and opened up new possibilities for the industry participants. Despite the huge digitisation potential and opportunities in the construction and mining industry, players and technology giants have not been able to identify specific disruptions/transformations to improve their business profits or workplace flows.

The industry has been prone to cost overruns and schedule delays.According to a study conducted by McKinsey, almost 80% of the projects are over the budget and 20% take longer to finish. The major contributor to this trend has been the resistance from stakeholders to change and move away from the basics of process flow and project management. For example, performance management is inadequately measured and supply chain practices are still unsophisticated with bundles of paperwork and documents moving from one department/stakeholder to another. The other challenge has been to have one technological solution that could be rolled out over multiple sectors with a large geographic spread. Each project has its own complexity and the industry has been segregated between various disciplines, making it difficult to adapt a unified workflow. Therefore no one person or company wants to take the risk of being a guinea pig in testing out an expensive technology. But there are still smarter and simpler technologies that could achieve the same goal with less to no investment.