Jero Juujärvi

The Open BIM and BIM-based production has created an efficient and easy-to-use digital interface for our infrastructure construction sites. What was held only on foremen’s minds and on paper before is now accessible through IoT and Software that are integrated into excavators, trucks, equipment, and gadgets. Today it is great to work in the construction industry, as now we all are enabled to cheaply develop automation and intelligence as real-time data and the richness of that data can be captured. But that’s not what I am going to talk about today. While we have these gigantic opportunities to revolutionize the construction industry, why no one hasn’t achieved that? Most main contractors have research and development to build solutions to achieve greater efficiency, but after 10 years we still see these “trailblazers” using these solutions in few projects while 90% of projects are done the traditional way. This all comes to challenges of adopting BIM and finding the best practices around this topic. If we look at how a single tool is deployed company-wide in a timeline it looks something like this: Pilot projects (+1 years) – Testing, failing and finding a few best practices use this tool Big project adoption (+2 years) – Building on best practices to fine-tune it as part of the process of construction Company-wide adoption (+3 years) – On smaller projects, resources are already limited and things have to be narrowed down to action steps to achieve adoption and benefit. So realistically, anything new takes 6 years to be adopted organically. Of course, leadership can enforce this, to fasten the adoption, but then we face dramatic inefficiency issues and bleed money to adopt something that wastes more time than gives. Because project cycles in the construction industry are long, so are our iteration cycles. We pilot things at our projects, projects take 1-2 years to complete and after that period we receive one iteration. When enough iterations have happened and the benefit is refined enough, then others want to test and pilot it themselves. Having 6 years of adoption period is too slow, as nowadays every 2 years, or maybe even every year comes new major technology, tool, or machine that allows us to build up our construction engine even further and achieve greater efficiencies. What every construction company needs is to be able to empower adaptability. To have much faster iteration cycles of test, reflect, and improve. And then share results and findings easily among peers so others can start reaping benefits and together build better practices on top of that. I will talk about how to make that 6 years adoption period much shorter through 2 deployment example cases (Deploying foreman’s GNSS and Deploying , where I will go through and steps to prepare, execute, and retune­ to adopt new practices faster.