The Digital Twin Operating System for Construction Jobsites
How Buildots is unlocking value for construction contractors with a project visibility layer
Happy New Year and hope everyone had a great holiday season! Today’s Innovation Armory is a deep dive into the opportunity to leverage AI and machine learning to meaningfully improve productivity across construction jobsites. Thank you to Roy Danon, CEO & Founder of Buildots, for sharing his perspective for this piece. Read on for more about:
The large cost of productivity lags in construction vs. other sectors
The snowball effect of compounding system errors on jobsites
How jobsite visibility is critical to solving construction’s largest problems
Understanding the jobsite as a computing stack
Buildots’ opportunity to become the de facto construction operating system
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The construction industry globally is a massive sector with estimates indicating that at least $10 trillion is spent per year on construction goods and services. For reference:
This would make construction a top 5 global industry in contribution to the total world economy
Only two countries (US and China) have GDPs larger
This is 35x the net worth of Elon Musk; I hate that this is even a relevant statistic
Construction Jobsites Today are Blackboxes, Even to Their Managers
However, relative to other sectors in the global economy where productivity has increased meaningfully over time, construction productivity has been stagnant. McKinsey estimates that the productivity gap between construction and the average in other industries costs up to $1.6 trillion per year, with the bulk of that inefficiency coming from North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific:
Fewer than 30% of construction projects actually finish on-time, with some industry estimates even lower. There are multiple categories of issues that can go wrong including:
Labor delays from no shows, staffing shortages and procrastination
Materials destruction or breakdown from weather events, malfunction or obsolescence
Equipment failure or equipment setup issues
Payment and insurance issues that prevent subcontractors from starting on-time
Lots more!
These delays can drag on for years and years. The recently completed American Dream Mall in New Jersey took 17 years to finish from project completion after being delayed for years on end and changing ownership multiple times:
When you Google around for “most common reason for jobsite delay”, almost all lists have “general waiting around” as a top 5 answer. This might sound like a ridiculous reason, but it’s indicative of a broader trend. While most jobsites are delayed, no one (not even the superintendents or the attending project managers) has a good grip of what is going on or what is creating the bottleneck and the end result is that labor ends up waiting around until someone manually figures out the issues. Waiting around is a symptom of a series of complex underlying problems
Construction jobsites are very complex and superintendents are tasked with coordinating the movement of labor, machinery and materials towards a broader project blueprint. Often the sub-tasks that each worker is completing layer on top of one another and are interrelated, which makes it particularly difficult to perform diagnostics on which inefficiency needs to be tackled first in order to address a system-wide problem. When taken together, a bunch of small issues on the jobsite can snowball into a big problem that costs millions of dollars...
If you had to go and with pen and paper manually or aided via chunky legacy software and identify i) which of these problems exist and ii) where to allocate resources first, how well would you do at it? Probably about as well as you’d solve this problem:
The missing piece of the equation to help construction managers diagnose and resolve inefficiency on the jobsite has always been visibility. Managers need a system to transparently observe the system and understand how the reality of the project is mapping to their blueprint. To learn more about innovation in the construction visibility space, I caught up with Roy Danon, CEO & Co-Founder of Buildots, the leading construction visibility company that helps identify and resolve inefficiencies on the jobsite with AI-powered computer vision.
A Snapshot of my Conversation with Roy Danon (CEO & Co-Founder of Buildots)
SN: Could you talk about the visibility problem that exists within construction on jobsites today?
RD: There is very limited visibility today on what is happening at most construction jobsites. For example, on many jobsites where we implement, the contractors lose control of what was happening on-site relative to plan. Sometimes these jobsites are tens of thousands of man hours behind, with these inefficiencies spread across hundreds of different activities occurring on the jobsite. There are lots of small inefficiencies that can also combine into a systemwide catastrophe on-site. Much of the tracking of process workflows that we analyze is still in the stone age and done by pen and paper, which contributes to the oversight and visibility issue. Buildots can identify smaller gaps earlier on in jobsites to prevent them from escalating into broader system-wide issues.
SN: Could you discuss some of the specific ways in which your computer vision platform adds value to the jobsite?
RD: We provide superintendents and project managers the control room for the jobsite that they wish they had, but have never had historically. We track progress on the jobsite across all key functions and our data can be and is used to optimize all verticals across the jobsite like labor, materials and assets. One of our key features for jobsite superintendents, we call “Loose Ends.” On construction jobsites, tasks and projects often layer on top of one another and a new subcontractor can’t start a job until his or her prior finishes. We help identify loose ends where open tasks left incomplete by priors are impacting the next worker from doing their work efficiently on the jobsite. We also leverage our data to help optimize project controls and scheduling. We also integrate with the master project plan to update it automatically to sync with real-time conditions on the construction jobsite.
A Construction OS Unlocks Incredible Design, Diagnostic and Predictive Value
At its core, Buildots leverages camera hardware already installed on the jobsite as inputs to feed a computer vision model in a software-only approach that creates a digital twin of how a jobsite is meant to operate from inception. Actual daily movements, tasks, etc. that are tracked on camera are mapped against the digital twin representation of how the jobsite ought to be working at any given time when compared back to the master project plan. When discrepancies related to the projected master plan are detected, the program escalates insights and alerts to superintendents and project managers who can handle the situation in a timely way before the issues cause material delays or add meaningful incremental costs to the project:
The end result of this non-stop visibility on the jobsite is to give superintendents and project managers superpowers on the jobsite by giving them the operating system and control tower to efficiently manage specific tasks (applications) and their interfacing with the physical assets, labor and materials on the jobsite (hardware):
With this visibility and operating system layer in place, it is fascinating to consider the incredible value that Buildots will be able to unlock by building additional products and integrations into its construction software ecosystem. While the opportunities are plentiful, I believe some of the most meaningful ones are in system design and budgeting, materials replenishment, staffing optimization, projected maintenance / refueling and payments.
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