I'm Victoria Allen, digital construction coordinator for Graham.
I'm responsible for the implementation and adoption of the digital construction
strategy and the transformation for the business. We try and incorporate new
digital tools onto site and into the offices all over the UK.
My name is Sherwin Yousefzadeh, digital construction manager at Graham.
I’m in charge of implementing BIM process
and new technology into the Civils department.
When the government mandate for the BIM level 2 came out in 2016, Graham really saw this as an
opportunity to change our traditional workflows. All of our business processes
were very paper intensive which meant that we didn't have any sort of trail of
information all in one place and that restricted collaboration, it restricted
engagement. We wanted to enhance the way that we work collaboratively and
increase the digital tools that we were using and that was the perfect
opportunity to start that. The technology was that final piece of the puzzle that
really made sure that we could deliver those ambitious requirements that we're
seeing now from clients that really want something innovative, they want something new
and they want us to deliver it a lot more efficiently and be productive and
that's kind of where these technologies add value.
Since the start of our digital transformation journey
we have adopted laser scanners,
we are using immersive technology in our jobs
virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality.
We are using the cloud capturing tools on-site to capture most of our data on tablets
and we are using technology for data analytics for the data that we capture using the drones.
We are using immersive technology on almost all our projects to
engage better with our clients and our supply chains. One of the good examples is
one of the hospitals that we had in Scotland, we exported that model into the VR
environment and we let the nurses and doctors view their future place of work
and from that, we got feedback to change our design to make it work better for them.
Every business when they're trying to kind of change things up are going to come
to some sort of barrier or roadblock and we did see some
of those when we were trying to introduce these new tools and processes.
In people, it was definitely the cultural change and that new way of working that
they weren't used to. We made sure that our digital construction team were
always there providing that support on the BIM processes as well as the
digital technologies that we were trying to introduce and adopt on site, as well as
in the offices. It was very important to us to have a clear strategy and when it
came to adopting industry 4.0 technologies, we made sure we really
did our research, chose the right tools for the business and invested in those
were we saw benefit. Invest Northern Ireland gave us a real sort of insight into what the
industry was looking for, as well as what they could provide. They were
able to give us access to the right collaborators within Northern
Ireland and they gave us the good sort of foundations to be able to know where
we could get more funding, more R&D and kind of progress things further.
One of the most important benefit we get from technology is improved productivity
on-site and we have a record of 10 per cent improved productivity by using
one of our cloud capturing tools on-site.
The other thing is we have real-time access to the information, which is really important for us
because it has also reduced the margin of errors in comparison with the traditional method of using papers.
And also using technology has improved our engagement with the clients and all stakeholders.
Three tips I would give to businesses looking to embrace
these new digital technologies is probably don't be afraid of the
technology. You really need to do your research and be sure of what it is
you're trying to achieve in the business. Another tip would be - you want to be able
to outline the need for that technology and how you're going to use it in the
business. It's very, very important that it's clear and that the approach is
there and that you have a good strategy in place. My final tip would be to listen
to all of your employees. These are the people that are going to be using the
technology, so at the end of the day, the feedback from those employees and how
you can better their day-to-day jobs is the most important thing.