Our coverage of the AEC industry here at Geo Week News often skews toward the most cutting-edge and exciting technologies. From artificial intelligence to digital twins, BIM, and reality capture, there are tools available today that are revolutionizing the industry and streamlining workflows. However, as anyone in the industry can tell you, it’s not just these kinds of eye-catching tools that are helping make the sector more efficient and improving productivity in the field. Often, it’s the less “exciting” tools that really make the difference day-to-day for firms.
Below, you can find some of our coverage within that realm, highlighting tools or workflows that don’t necessarily utilize the most extravagant technology but nonetheless make real, material impacts on firms within the industry.
How All Forms of Technology Help Construction Teams Meet Tight Deadlines
For this article, Geo Week News spoke to a representative from Matern Professional Engineering, a Florida-based engineering firm. The conversation focused on some of the key changes the organization made in recent years to help transform its efficiency, including things like adding tablets to the arsenal of those in the field and better data-sharing practices, all of which have helped make some of their busiest times of year that much smoother.
The AEC Industry is Modernizing its Data Sharing Practices
That data-sharing piece is a crucial one of this conversation. The AEC industry includes massive amounts of data that need to go between disparate teams of stakeholders, all often working with different machines and standards. This can make data-sharing much more complex than other sectors, which leads many firms to stick with archaic sharing practices like mailing physical hard drives. This article looks at how companies are starting to digitalize this process and the benefits that shift present.
What Architecture and Engineering Firms Need to Know Before Moving to the Cloud
Looking at the technology space in general, the movement of data from on-premise servers to the cloud has been among the biggest developments of the last quarter century. However, shifting to the cloud from on-prem is still an ongoing process for many corners of the AEC industry due to, among other things, data security concerns. In this article, guest author Bryce Wolf runs through some of the key considerations firms need to keep in mind before making that leap.
Safe Site Check In adds new project onboarding features
Safe Site Check In is a great example of this concept we’re capturing here around digital tools being used for less eye-popping but extremely important parts of a job. This article looks at a new release from the company last year adding new digital options for some tedious but important parts of a job, like onboarding workers for a project, scanning badges when entering the site, and maintaining safety checks.
Solving Construction’s Hidden Cost Driver: Scheduling
Similarly, scheduling for construction projects can often be a major barrier for firms, particularly over the last half-decade or so as supply chains have been disrupted by a number of outside factors. Keeping everything on track using all manual processes leaves the firm open to mistakes and omissions, ultimately setting project timelines back and losing money. This article highlights a digital tool that is being used to streamline that work.
