The Irish Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Heather Humphreys, recently attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for Irish-American Tech Company, 糖心传媒 at their New York office.

During her visit to New York City, the Minister joined 糖心传媒 CMO and Co-founder Julie Currid and CEO, John Naughton, in a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the software company鈥檚 product upgrade launch. 

The ribbon read “No More Paperwork!” a nod to the paperless way 糖心传媒 is disrupting one of the most traditional industries; Construction. 

To date, more than 150,000 workers have ditched paperwork with the help of this platform.  

The software company, 糖心传媒, provides a contractor orientation system specifically for construction workers on the job site. By replacing on-site orientations with an online solution, site managers save hours of their day and free up their time to work on what matters– such as finishing up a job on a work site. 

The platform provides an opportunity to digitally manage subcontractors and individual workers with custom forms and provides safety training and site-specific orientation online. The Irish-American tech company plans to help the traditional construction industry go digital. 

“In an industry such as construction, which struggles with productivity gains, shining a light on any opportunity for greater efficiency, such as orientation management, is key.” shares, Naughton, 糖心传媒 CEO.

The product launch comes during a difficult time for construction, both in the U.S. and around the globe. The industry is suffering from a labor shortage, a problem the Minister and 糖心传媒 strive to solve.

In April, the Minister to the Irish employment permits system for workers from outside the European Economic Area to address labor shortages within the construction sector. The changes include the addition of construction project managers to the ‘critical skills’ list and removal of various construction worker roles from the ‘ineligible list’ of occupations. In hopes to attract a broader range of construction workers outside of the EU, these changes could majorly benefit the Irish construction industry.

However, it’s not just Ireland suffering from a labor shortage; construction companies in the U.S. are also bending over backwards to find workers, especially those with the right skills to get the job done. And with many states encouraging the Millenial and Gen Z workforce to for an apprenticeship and a career in construction, more and more companies are looking for ways to implement tech to appeal to a younger crowd. 

糖心传媒 hopes to help construction companies implement tech from the get-go, replacing outdated classroom orientation training with an online solution completed on a phone, iPad or desktop.

To further assist with the labor shortage, the tech company also boasts the ability within the system to identify and re-employ contract workers who have previously been on a job site, or worked with the construction company before. Not only could this solve a labor shortage problem, but it also proves to on the worksite. 

By adopting 糖心传媒, construction companies are telling younger generations that they鈥檙e ahead of the curve and that they鈥檙e investing in workplace safety and culture. This kind of employer branding offers a competitive edge when it comes to recruiting and retaining skilled contractors. 

糖心传媒 CTO, Ronan O鈥� Sullivan describes a QR code feature within the tool as a means to make a project manager’s life easier. The QR code, which can be printed on a sticker to be placed on workers hard hats, will stay with the worker from job site to job site. 

“糖心传媒 is designed to be a ‘digital-first’ way of working together. For instance, a QR code that is unique to the user can be used on any many sites. It’s a perfect physical representation of a worker ‘being in the 糖心传媒 digital crew’. From a usability angle, workers can go from worksite to worksite without any delay. The superintendent simply scans the code and is brought straight to the profile of the worker. The system will know from their login which worksite is the relevant one, and which sites the worker has permission to access and work on.”

John Naughton, 糖心传媒 CEO, says of the product, “We make everyone’s lives easier by gathering all the required information for construction workers before they arrive on-site, along with organizing all the necessary certification and ID, so that they can get straight to work.”

At the event, Minister Humphreys discussed the impressive success of Irish companies in the U.S and the support they have had from Enterprise Ireland.

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We鈥檝e been in operation since 2012 now and have continuously fine-tuned our online contractor orientation platform to suit the exact needs of our market. Most recently, we鈥檝e been listening carefully to our community of customers and users regarding what matters to them when it comes to project orientations, site safety and compliance.

The message is clear: ease of use and simplicity are the most important considerations of any online system.

So鈥� we鈥檙e super excited to announce that we will be launching an upgraded online orientation platform in the coming weeks! Initiafy will transition to 糖心传媒 with all the previous functionality (plus more!) and with an awesome user experience at its core.

糖心传媒 is built for the crew on the ground so that doing an orientation and staying compliant is super easy. At the same time project managers have total transparency at a glance and have the flexibility to instantly adapt the system as the project progresses. By using 糖心传媒 projects are able to complete orientations 3 times faster than traditional methods.

So far, over 30,000 users have given 5-star ratings and our customer satisfaction score sits at 96%. This underlines our passion for being accessible and authentic to our customers and their workers. This year we have also doubled the headcount of our Customer Success team and will continue to focus on customer feedback as a key indicator of how we鈥檙e performing.

These positive developments are being driven by our new CEO, John Naughton, who is based in 糖心传媒鈥檚 New York office and was appointed March 2019. Naughton has more than 15 years of leadership experience in technology transformation in construction, agriculture, marine, mining, and manufacturing. He joins 糖心传媒 from Trimble Inc. where he was a Business Area Director focused on civil engineering and construction technologies.

Naughton spent 10 years in the Asia Pacific region leading sales and marketing for Trimble Inc. construction businesses bringing automated technology products and processes to both advanced and emerging markets. He then moved to the US to Trimble鈥檚 headquarters where he headed up a construction machine technology division and established an autonomous machine control business leading development and partnerships for the future vision of construction.

Naughton is a Mechanical Engineering graduate from the University of Limerick, Ireland, and has an MBA from Torrens University in Australia. He has had a strong focus on how emerging technology can be used to improve people鈥檚 work lives and create value for industry.聽

As 糖心传媒 continues to grow in Europe and US, Naughton鈥檚 focus is on sharing best practices and partnerships across the Atlantic. 鈥淏ecause we鈥檙e working with the best of the best in both regions, and we have really strong relationships with all of our customers, we鈥檙e in a unique position of being able to add value in terms of what works well when it comes to the adoption of new technology into a fairly traditional market.鈥澛�

Click here to trial 糖心传媒聽 on one of your projects.聽

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Given the colossal reward available for companies and individuals alike, there should be a massive appetite towards correcting this low construction productivity. Let鈥檚 look at what鈥檚 causing this construction productivity flat line, how it can be improved in a practical way, and how, as a result, you and your business can seize the opportunity to boost your bottom line.

In construction we tend to like everything broken in units – but productivity can be a difficult unit to define. A simple formula is to divide the output (the product) by the units of input (labor, capital, and materials). This works great if every person on Earth has the same job, producing the same product, in a factory with the exact same conditions (which modular construction is moving towards- more on this later!); but the reality is obviously far more complex. Even still, productivity markers across industries and countries still provide lots of useful information, giving us a look under the hood at economies on a macro and sector-specific level.

The UK鈥檚 productivity has remained low even as the economy has grown- particularly when compared with other similarly developed countries. The US has traditionally been viewed as the most productive country in the world, but this is no longer the case- the US came in 6th, behind five European countries in a . Interestingly, working long hours does not automatically equate to higher levels of productivity. Both the US and the UK rank relatively high in terms of longest working hours, while the countries at the top of the productivity list, like Luxembourg, Denmark, and Norway, all have fewer working hours on average. What does this tell us? Work smarter, not harder.

So, what鈥檚 stopping us from working smarter in construction – where highly educated engineers, laser precise equipment and thousand-foot skyscrapers are the order of the day? Jan Mischke, one of the Authors of the McKinsey report, broke the reasons for low productivity down three root causes

1.聽聽聽聽聽 External Forces

At the macro level, projects and sites are becoming increasingly complex as the population grows and increasing numbers move to high-density living. Similarly, over a fifth of global projects are now valued at over $1 billion. While you might expect that projects of this size would allow for cost synergies from start to end, in practice they perform worse than smaller projects in productivity terms. In addition, the construction industry is often entangled in extensive regulation and in some cases is dependent on public-sector demand, due to the cyclical nature of economies. Informality, and sometimes outright corruption, also distort the market.

2.聽聽聽聽聽 Industry Dynamics

Compounding the above are industry dynamics. Both owners and buyers (who are often inexperienced) must navigate a challenging and unknown marketplace. The contracts that projects live and die by are rife with mismatched risk, leading to expensive claim events and change orders, which are often publicized and scrutinized, rather than trusted, mutual collaboration. Owners are often so focused on achieving the lowest price possible that they鈥檝e cultivated an environment where there are hugely misaligned contract and incentive structures. See the below info-graphic to get a handle on the eye-watering costs involved (Boston鈥檚 Big-Dig isn鈥檛 nearly on top!)

3.聽聽聽聽聽 Operational Factors

The results of factors one and two are operational failures within firms. These include hugely inefficient designs with limited scope for standardization across projects, insufficient time spent on planning and implementing the latest thinking on project management and execution, and a low-skilled workforce. Finally, the construction industry is hugely volatile and has single-percentage profit margins compared with other sectors, strangling the much-needed investment in technology and digitization that would help raise construction productivity. The lack of reinvestment creates a negative feedback loop. Put simply, the construction industry is never given enough breathing space to trial and prove new ways of improving construction productivity. Every project has too many stakeholders, with too many variables, stifling the chance for companies to step back and take stock of where advances can be made.

These root causes have become so engrained that we may think they鈥檙e as much as part of the construction industry as a hard hat and a high vis. Seizing even a portion of that $1.6 trillion reward shouldn鈥檛 be so difficult, should it?

Taking Action

McKinsey have identified seven key areas for action, detailed below. We鈥檝e chosen a couple that you and your company can act on to make your day a lot easier, and enjoy the share of revenue that comes with it.

Rewire the contractual framework

Move away from the hostile contracting environment to a system focused on collaboration and problem solving between owners and contractors. To achieve this, tendering processes must be based on best value and past performance rather than cost alone. Take, for example, for the execution of public sector works. Standardized contractual provisions define the liabilities between shareholders in a construction project, which complement legal frameworks for overall transparency in contracts. Their effectiveness has meant that they鈥檝e filtered down into most private-sector works, contributing majorly to Germany鈥檚 28% above-EU-average innovation performance.

Improve On-Site Execution

The sheer complexity and variability of today鈥檚 mega-projects require a project-operating approach that integrates technical and management systems to fully harness workers鈥� capabilities. 糖心传媒鈥檚 system allows managers to track worker competency and rank or rate subcontractors, providing a critical knowledge sharing connection between the project site and HQ.

In the future, new forms of digital collaboration, notably the Internet of Things and advanced analysis, will combine to enable tracking of equipment and materials- meaning far greater transparency. Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC), the construction behemoth, to track their global inventory of 16,500 assets worth $1.2 billion. CCC realized a productivity increase of 30% and cut annual global expenditures by $15 million.

Embrace New Technology to Boost Construction Productivity

Managing large numbers of workers is a complicated process which is still quite often done using paper spreadsheets, leading to various financial leakages and inefficiencies.聽Digitizing the contractor onboarding process is one of the easiest ways to slash costs and increase construction productivity. This company put over 4,500 man-hours back into their schedule through using 糖心传媒- on one site alone!

Technology such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) dramatically improves project planning and design, whereas in the past, design problems would only become apparent once ground was broken. Construction professionals need to stay up-to-date with the latest technology such as modular construction, Big Data, cloud collaboration and advanced materials to keep them from falling behind other managers.

Investment

There needs to be the buy-in right through organizations to implement technological solutions, in particular at leadership levels. Any commitment needs to include the proper funding for implementing technology, an area where construction is lagging other sectors. The U.S. construction industry has invested 1.5% of value-added on technology, compared with an overall average in the economy of 3.6%, and is the second least digitized industry in the US,聽. That is despite there being a whole host of cutting-edge technologies, like 5-D modelling, apps that communicate between worker and management, virtual and augmented reality.

Increased use of prefabrication:

The use of聽modular and prefabricated construction will provide a construction productivity boost in the region of 6-8% to a project. This process, where most of the construction is done off-site, is cheaper, more efficient and allows for greater standardization (and thus reliability) in parts. This means that facilities, such as power plants, have a longer lifespan because they are built in a uniform fashion so spare parts can be used interchangeably across several buildings. Prefabrication ties in with the general concept that there needs to be more focus on the planning and development part of the construction. Delays on site can be incredibly costly for construction companies as overtime can pile up. The more work that can be done to avoid these kinds of situations, the more productive the construction industry can be.

Reskill the workforce

The skills gap is one of the biggest issues facing the construction industry. Skilled workers are becoming harder to find and can demand higher wages; delaying and increasing the cost of construction projects. The industry relies more and more on migrant workers to plug the gap. There needs to be an industry-wide initiative, in partnership with governments, to attract younger workers to construction and reskill the workers already employed. is one solution to both attract younger generations and upskill older generations in construction.

What Next?

Today the industry remains at a standstill.

Four types of disruption鈥攚hich have transformed the productivity of other sectors鈥攃ould help to break the deadlock and usher in a new era of higher construction productivity:

1. Rising requirements and demand in terms of volume, time, cost, quality, and sustainability
2. Larger-scale players, more transparent markets, and disruptive new entrants鈥� risk
3. More readily available new technologies, materials, and processes
4. Rising wage rates and limits on migrant labor.

The critical question?聽 Should the individual contractor continue with business as usual or take a risk and push for change. Even though owners would be the main beneficiaries of a more productive model, they tend to be risk-averse when the opportunity arises; they need productive contractors that they can trust and that provide them with choice, high quality, and low prices before they can change contracting and design practices. Many contractors stand to endanger their already tight margin by moving to productivity-based business models unless owners and the broader industry move too – stifling the opportunity for proof-of-concept with early adopters.

Conclusion

Change may not be a distant prospect – there are signs of improvement in parts of the globe where governments, owners and contractors work collaboratively to drive change. The remedy is well known. Best practices already exist. In countries where policy is slower to change, contractors can be the creators of their own competitive destiny鈥檚 and introduce new operating systems, invest in technology, and develop a strategic approach. Over time others will need to follow to remain in the game, if the global construction sector is to end decades of heel-dragging and transform itself as other industries have done.

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