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.

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.

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.

There is a lot of talk about "smart" things, infrastructure included. But what does that really mean? We have recently released a new web report entitled The Promise of Smart Infrastructure. In it we answer this question and present the opportunity that smart infrastructure provides for addressing the investment gap that exists between current spending on global infrastructure and the (much greater) need for new investment over the next 20+ years. During the next few weeks we will offer a series of blog posts presenting sections of the report.

At the Smart Cities Connect conference in Denver last week there was discussion about how to make the most productive use of the enormous amounts of data that will be connected as cities implement smart city initiatives. Dell EMC's Chief Technology Officer, Rob Silverberg, said that cities should consider creating a singular data platform for collecting all data rather than  creating information silos that will ultimately need to share data. He suggested a "system of systems" strategy for creating a holistic smart transportation system rather than a series of individual initiatives... such as smart parking, smart lighting, etc.

This strategy is not unique to smart cities. With data collection and analysis becoming central to improved productivity, data centralization is critical to most industries these days. This includes the manufacturers that provide cities with their infrastructure.

Seattle just completed its SR 99 tunnel, a project that replaced the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel that runs under the city and offers substantially more protection to motorists against the effects of an earthquake. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) bills the tunnel as "one of the smartest tunnels ever built".  It's no surprise, therefore, that WSDOT required that product data for the segments manufactured for each ring of the tunnel be captured and transmitted to the DOT in digital form.