Tracking Infrastructure

In the spirit of this week's Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, I want to use this blog post to express our appreciation and do some giving of our own. We are enormously grateful for the opportunity to serve the construction market with our Connected Concrete^TM product tracking service. We're particularly grateful to our customers, all of whom stood with us during a difficult patch this year. As a result, we are better and stronger. Thank you for your patronage! 

We have a credo at Idencia that we want every party that engages with us in any way to find that they are better off for the experience. This is how we express our appreciation through actions all year long.

So, Thanksgiving week is a good time to share some things we are doing to show our appreciation.

This past week consumer apparel company, Ralph Lauren, announced that it is going to be 'digitizing' every product it manufactures. Why would a company with such well known brands (Polo, Club Monaco, Ralph Lauren Collection) go to the bother of ensuring that every product it manufactures has a digital identity? And why should manufacturers of products used in infrastructure and commercial construction care that Ralph Lauren is doing this?

Amazon engages its vendors through a web interface it calls Vendor Central. Parties invited to become vendors register on the platform and their relationship with Amazon is managed on it. Why does Amazon operate in this way? Because it is the most cost-efficient way of doing business. All commerce will eventually follow Amazon's lead and engender the efficiency that platforms offer.

This is the third in a series of posts from our recently published vision statement called The Infrastructure Supply Chain Platform. Today we discuss how infrastructure manufacturers will engage with their vendors on a platform to save time, reduce costs and add more value to the end users of the products they produce.

Advances in information technology over the past 30 years have created a foundation for improved manufacturing productivity that is often dubbed the Second Industrial Revolution. In the first revolution electricity was the underlying technology. But it was the application of this technology to a new manufacturing model... the assembly line... that created the productivity break-through. Today, information technology is serving as the foundation for another new model... the industry platform.

This is the second in a series of posts drawing from our vision statement for the future of infrastructure manufacturing. Today we discuss how manufacturers can provide a quantum leap in the value that they offer by using a customer-facing platform to provide seamless data sharing.

There is a lot written about technology and the role it will play in improving the productivity of the construction process. But how will technology improve the efficiency of the construction product supply chain?

This is the first in a series of posts dedicated to this topic and it draws from our recently published vision statement entitled: "The Infrastructure Supply Chain Platform". We start with a dive into how systems integration will help manufacturers realize improved productivity from systems they already have in place.

"Modular construction's time may have finally come." This is how McKinsey & Company summarized the findings of its June 2019 report Modular construction: From projects to products, a follow-up to its 2017 report about reinventing construction to produce $1.6 trillion of productivity improvements. The possibilities include accelerated timelines (estimated 20-50%) and cost reductions of 20%. McKinsey reports that the primary factor enabling these possibilities is the application of technology. All manufacturers, modular or not, will want to understand the technology landscape in order to compete effectively. We offer a profile here.

In our newsletter published this week, the article that received the most attention was titled 'Why Precast Should Pay Attention'. This was our title applied to an article that we circulated about a Cleveland, OH contractor's decision to offer integrated construction services. It obviously struck a chord, so we thought we would re-frame it as a question and respond with a deeper dive into how integrated construction is a threat to the precast industry.

In its 2017 report entitled Reinventing Construction: A Route to Higher Productivity, the McKinsey Global Institute revealed that the construction industry lags all other major industries in productivity. In fact, the construction industry experienced a productivity decline of almost 1.5% per year from 2005 through 2014. In this, our third in a series of blog posts drawn from our recent web report, The Promise of Smart Infrastructure, we discuss the ways in which development of smart infrastructure will induce the construction industry to become more productive.

The globe faces three major problems that impede the construction of adequate infrastructure over the next 20 years:

1. $94 trillion of investment is needed.
2. The construction industry is not presently equipped to address the need.
3. Government budgets are constricting investment and maintenance funding.

The construction of smart infrastructure will address these problems head on. It will also provide public benefit that will make 'dumb' infrastructure obsolete in the not-so-distant future.

We have heard (separately) from two precast manufacturers that it costs $25,000 to conduct an inventory count. If there is one process that immediately justifies automated data collection, this is it.  While the cost naturally depends on the size of the yard... they both have yards of about 40 acres... automating inventory counts for yards of any size will produce obvious savings. RFID tracking is the solution to this and, with a few kinks to work out, there are a few ways that this will happen.