Founded in 1934, Lokhorst is a developing contractor that focuses primarily on the construction, renovation, and maintenance for various clients across the utility, commercial, and social sectors. Based in the Netherlands, the firm holds itself to high standards of quality, sustainability, and safety and takes pride in working closely with clients to deliver high-end buildings within scope and budget. 

Every contractual agreement for goods and services includes the requirement for requesting and approving payment due and tracking payment status. In Construction, this process is a massive undertaking for Cost/Project Managers. They need to collect payment applications from every Supplier on the project and ensure they accurately reflect the work completed based on their work items for the current billing period before they can submit their own payment application to the Owner. 

DPR Construction started in 1990 when three construction veterans set out to form a company based around the ideas of service and excellence. Very early on they set high standards for quality and delivery, with the goal to provide not only customer satisfaction, but to create something new in an industry that was known for being resistant to change. Their core values reflect the progressive nature of the founders’ thinking: Integrity, Enjoyment, Uniqueness, Ever forward. They wanted to create an ideal workplace and gather likeminded people: people who want to work hard, but who also want to enjoy their work; people who are driven to work on unique projects and who thrive in an environment where they can always strive to reach higher.

One of the greatest pain points for construction professionals is the time spent administering workflows and information exchange. It’s an often tedious yet necessary task. A recent study published by PlanGrid, in partnership with FMI, found that 35% of teams’ time is spent on ‘non-optimal’ work - and this work adds up to a whopping $177 billion labor cost to firms. 

Now in its eighth year, the AEC Excellence Awards is proud to highlight the innovators behind some of the most stunning infrastructure and building projects from all over the world. These bold visionaries have integrated Connected BIM into their workflows, in addition to emerging technologies like generative design and industrialized construction.

Now in its eighth year, the AEC Excellence Awards is proud to highlight the innovators behind some of the most stunning infrastructure and building projects from all over the world. These bold visionaries have integrated Connected BIM into their workflows, in addition to emerging technologies like generative design and industrialized construction.

AIA Arquitectos e Ingenieros Asociados S.A. is a leading design and construction company in Colombia. In business for 70 years, the company employs 600 direct and 2,000 indirect employees and has delivered over 700 projects across Colombia from infrastructure to buildings.

Now in its eighth year, the AEC Excellence Awards is proud to highlight the innovators behind some of the most stunning infrastructure and building projects from all over the world. These bold visionaries have integrated Connected BIM into their workflows, in addition to emerging technologies like generative design and industrialized construction.

Now in its eighth year, the AEC Excellence Awards is proud to highlight the innovators behind some of the most stunning infrastructure and building projects from all over the world. These bold visionaries have integrated Connected BIM into their workflows, in addition to emerging technologies like generative design and industrialized construction.

Today’s digitized workflow creates enormous amounts of data from a growing number of sources, which makes it difficult to keep track of. By converging live jobsite cameras, AI, and 360° reality capture with Navisworks and Revit models, a powerful multifaceted model emerges making it easier to organize actionable information more efficiently.

Recently, we’ve been thinking a lot about jobsite productivity. When we read McKinsey Global Institute (MGI)’s analysis of productivity in the construction industry, we were a little shocked to discover that large construction projects typically take 61% longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 70% over budget. It seems that many of the issues affecting the outcome of a construction project are outside of an owner, contractor, or subcontractor’s control - including competitive pressure, increasing project complexity, and a shortage of skilled labor. However, there are also quite a few areas that can be improved without making major disruptions to teams’ current workflows.



Here’s a few tips to improve construction field productivity, and ultimately maximize project profitability:

Overview

The John Lewis, Cheltenham project involved many site photos for different reasons: documenting site conditions, communicating progress, issue identification and for clarification purposes to name a few. The challenge is being able to capture sufficient information and also documenting, managing and locating images. With the HoloBuilder solution, we found an easy to use tool to solve all the challenges presented.

Want a fast way to lose money, miss deadlines, and frustrate everyone from subs to project owners? It’s rework. Redoing something on a job site isn’t just a duplication of efforts. More often than not, rework requires some undoing first. That means you waste time, energy, and money in spades every single time rework is required.

But you already know this. What you may not know is how to avoid rework. After all, if there was a surefire way to make sure you never had to redo anything on a project ever again, everyone would do it. Wouldn’t they? Turns out, resistance to change could be keeping us all stuck in a rework loop.

As building information modeling (BIM) capabilities continue to advance across the construction industry, embracing new modeling software and techniques can be overlooked at times.  With BIM continuing to gain global traction, the construction industry remains rooted in the design principals of the past while looking toward the future. And while many agree there is a continued need for software training, identifying which types of training will most benefit teams can often be a burden to employers.  Teams may have limited budgets or in-house IT resources, which often keep employees from getting out from behind a desk or off the jobsite and into a classroom.

Everyone knows that two of the biggest areas of risk on a construction project are schedule delays and cost overruns. And the primary contributor to these schedule or cost impacts can be attributed to the growing number of RFIs construction teams deal with on a daily basis. A typical project can see on average 796 RFIs and can cost over $1,080 to respond to each one of these RFIs. That means that on average it costs a project's bottom line nearly $860k just to respond to RFIs. 

For the last five years, Connect & Construct has been a source of information – product news, customer stories, and thought leadership – on construction technology and tactics being deployed across the industry. From Contractors to Trades, we’ve covered a wide variety of topics that are top-of-mind to the industry looking for best practices on implementing technology into their day-to-day workflows to enhance project delivery, efficiency, safety, quality, and innovation.

Today, we are excited to introduce a new content stream – Autodesk Construction CloudTM. While you’ll still be able to read content on Connect & Construct centered around connecting design and operations, Autodesk Construction Cloud will share articles – customer stories, product news, and thought leadership – that spans the entire construction lifecycle from design to preconstruction to construction and all the way through to handover.

Construction teams are constantly bogged down with time consuming and costly RFI’s. Managing and dealing with RFI’s takes a ton of time, and let’s face it, is not the most glamorous task. According to research by Navigant Consulting, the average construction project has roughly 796 RFI’s. What would happen if you could not only manage the process better but actually work towards minimizing this high number of RFI’s?

Dura Vermeer is a family-owned Dutch company with more than 160 years of experience in construction, engineering and related services. The company’s core markets include residential and non-residential building, infrastructure, industrial construction, renovation and consultancy. According to Dura Vermeer Directory Board member Ronald Dielwart, the company’s corporate aspiration is to become one of the top three highest performing and digitized construction companies in the Netherlands by 2020.

As the industry drives toward increasingly digital processes to maximize efficiency, it is no longer just a matter of getting the job done, it’s about staying competitive. In a recent report, KPMG cited the jarring statistic that only 31% of all construction projects come within 10% of the predicted budget. That stat alone tells us that in order to do better, better tools are needed to help our teams improve how they control construction cost and manage change. It’s not just for the benefit of individual firms, but for the industry as a whole.

When was your “AI moment”? I’m talking about the first time you felt like artificial intelligence was coming, in force, to change the way business is done. Mine was in 2011, when an AI developed by IBM crushed some of the smartest people on the planet in a game of “Jeopardy!”. This is a game that seemingly requires human intelligence to parse the strange question/answer format, to understand the subtle cultural references and wordplay, and to react quickly to make sure you get to answer first. It was clear at that moment that I needed to reassess what was possible with AI.

The Balfour in Kirkwall, in the far north of Scotland, is set to transform the way healthcare services are delivered for the 20,000 residents of the Orkney Islands.

On any construction project, there are four main things every contractor cares about. No matter who you talk to on a construction project management team, they’re concerned about at least one of these aspects at any given time. In this blog, we’ll talk about what those four aspects are, how they can be reduced to one key piece of project information, and how Assemble easily makes this information available throughout the project lifecycle.

Now in its eighth year, the AEC Excellence Awards is proud to highlight the innovators behind some of the most stunning infrastructure and building projects from all over the world. These bold visionaries have integrated Connected BIM into their workflows, in addition to emerging technologies like generative design and industrialized construction.

What exactly is construction verification? I find that the word verification often has several varied definitions. It could be a comparison of what was designed versus the as built conditions, utilizing scans of the existing structure and comparing it against what was designed. Or it could be a comparison of what was designed versus what was installed on site, allowing us to know whether we are on schedule and what has been installed out of specified tolerances. Typically, when I think of verification on a construction site, I think of someone walking the jobsite, noting any issues and placing either sticky notes, or making markups on PDFs using software. Essentially making sure things were built or designed to tolerance.

Check out the podcast featuring ProjectReady’s CEO, Joseph Giegerich & COO, Kelly Doyle as they talk about system interoperability challenges in the AEC and how improving user experience through connected cloud systems helps firms become more effective and efficient:

Cloudsfer is a cloud-based data migration service supporting over 30 cloud and on-premise storage providers, including Autodesk’s BIM 360 construction project management platform. Developed by Tzunami, a pioneering content migration company that has provided data management and migration services to large organizations for over a decade. Cloudsfer provides the optimal toolset for all your cloud migration needs. Secure and easy-to-use, Cloudsfer offers cloud data migration from on-premise to cloud, or cloud to cloud, allowing users to instantly transfer and backup their files anywhere. You can also use Cloudsfer for archiving and replicating projects like A360 Project Archiving, BIM 360 team or even backing up your Buzzsaw data.

The construction industry is the fastest growing sector in tech development. Once notorious for being slow to adopt new technology, the industry is seeing a flood of new software, apps and information tools like drones and laser scanners. Contractors, always conscious of the bottom line, are driving this change, utilizing BIM in construction and looking for even more ways to increase quality while reducing costs. 

A Background on Sabermetrics:

On any large commercial construction project, trade contractors make up the hundreds, if not thousands, of construction workers on the job site. They operate the equipment, install materials, and, overall, get it done. They are the driving force on construction projects, responsible for implementing the intricate designs imagined by owners and design teams. 

Construction is a tough business, and to stay ahead you must stay on top of ways to keep your costs down and your workflow efficient. As a general contractor or construction manager, you know that good understanding and planning is vital to your success, and you are meticulous in building your estimates, analyzing all the angles and drafting project plans before you ever break ground. Even with all that planning, time and cost overruns are still a major risk to most construction projects.  Many factors are at work, but most of them can be boiled down to: 

• Poor insight and communication
• Poor cost overview and planning 
• Poor risk analysis or
• Poor management

If you’re part of the construction industry in the US, you have a peculiar problem: too much work for the number of available workers. The unemployment rate for construction workers is at an unbelievable low of 3.4%. Many in the industry say they’ve never seen so many job opportunities – estimated at 250,000 in mid-2018 – for so few interested in taking them. The good news for the workers who are available is that wages are increasing. The bad news for owners and builders is that wages are increasing. Higher wages naturally attract more workers, but many of them are inexperienced and require at least some training to get up to speed on a job. Quality, safety and productivity suffer as a result. The net effect to construction projects is an increase in costs, leading to budget overruns. Something’s got to give.

That something has turned out to be technology.

In my mind construction is the lifeblood of society. Whether during ancient times or modern times, humans have modified and built their worlds to survive and thrive. When you look at society’s basic needs - food, water, shelter, clothing - plus the next level of needs, like sanitation, education, healthcare or even the internet; construction directly enables all of them.

When you’re dealing with massive construction projects overseen by scores of project managers and swarms of subcontractors—all dealing with highly intricate details and a deluge of documents—there are numerous opportunities for snafus. 

The design, manufacture and construction industry is at a crossroad. Ok, it’s not breaking news – it’s a topic that has been increasingly visible over the last year. But, the fact is, we’re still stymied as to what the solution is and know there is no silver bullet. 

Over 250 years ago, during the Industrial Revolution, just about every industry recognized the importance of automation, improved machinery, and the need for a factory-like approach to speed production and reduce costs. Those industries mechanized and surged, but construction remained static.

Transforming your fabrication workflow from a traditional paper-based method to a digitally driven fabrication workflow may seem like a daunting task, but the payoff in doing so makes it well worth the effort.  Many mechanical and electrical contractors have begun to make the first step in replacing paper and relying upon electronic methods of transferring information via email, Excel files and PDFs. While this is a great first step, it remains labor intensive and disconnected from the BIM model itself.  Simply put, PDF-driven workflows cannot fully maximize the value that can be gained from the modeling work put in by the VDC teams.

Now in its eighth year, the AEC Excellence Awards is proud to highlight the innovators behind some of the most stunning infrastructure and building projects from all over the world. These bold visionaries have integrated Connected BIM into their workflows, in addition to emerging technologies like generative design and industrialized construction.

We know BIM in construction is a hot topic. And we are familiar with 3D modeling tools like Revit which enable us to create beautiful designs and actually put BIM into practice. But how do we leverage our understanding of BIM and the vast amount of data generated from Revit, to take it a step further?

Meet the 2019 AEC Innovator of the Year:

Amr Raafat

Director of Virtual Design & Construction

Windover Construction

Construction managers start with clear targets for quality, price, and schedule for their projects, but in order to be successful and profitable, they must first be able to skillfully navigate the inevitable fog created by changes and unforeseen conditions. 

One of the ways that construction managers successfully navigate the fog is through the proper implementation of a project delivery method. A project delivery method is a system that is used by the project owners for the acquisition of facility assets that include financing, design, construction, operations, and maintenance operations.

Tracking installed work on a jobsite has been predominantly done manually on paper drawings. This is not only imprecise, error prone and time-consuming, but also difficult to verify and to share with others. Tracked progress on paper is not usable digitally, which also delays the information flow. Many days or weeks can pass until the relevant information has reached the appropriate stakeholders.  This ultimately accrues unnecessary cost by the time a decision is made. Clearly, this just doesn’t work anymore.