Challenge

The shortage of skilled tradespeople and professionals is currently a significant challenge for the entire Irish construction sector.

Impact

This is having a detrimental impact on house building and other critical infrastructure requirements. This challenge has led to increased labour costs, delays to projects, and some project starts being cancelled.

Importance

Increased efficiency and better communication can help compensate for the lack of a physical workforce. Management technology reduces the number of positions workers must fill, particularly in administrative roles. Project management software allows the entire team to stay informed about project updates and deadlines. Armed with point cloud models and laser scan-based quality assurance, construction firms and contractors are taking a much closer look at the advantages of prefabrication and 3D printing. Offsite fabrication allows components or even whole buildings to be assembled away from the site. Robotics and automation free skilled workers to focus on critical tasks. While robots can be programmed to take on more complex tasks, no amount of robotic autonomy can replace the critical thinking ability of humans. The future of construction will not be one in which robots replace people, but one in which robots work alongside people to make their work safer and more efficient. 

Challenge

Over the past two decades, we have seen a worrying dip in the number of young people entering the construction industry.

Impact

The consequence of this is a lack of diversity, an aging workforce, and not enough young people inspired by careers in skilled trades.

Importance

Technology has a crucial role to play in attracting the next generation into the construction industry. As new employees join the industry outdated technologies and work practices that might have been tolerated by previous workforce generations may quickly become a drain on employee morale. Construction businesses need to invest in diversity, leverage technology, and innovation and redefine the public image of construction by portraying it as a smarter, safer, and greener industry.

Challenge

Despite many years of promoting the beneficial use of BIM in construction, evidence suggests that there is only sporadic use of the technology on an Irish construction project, particularly among SMEs. The key challenge is demonstrating the business case for utilising BIM throughout the project lifecycle so that a golden thread of data is available to owner-operators for downstream operational benefits.

Impact

The continued use of 2D paper-based processes and poor deployment of BIM continues to lead to errors, omissions, rework, increased construction costs, increased project durations, and increased litigation.

Importance

The time is ripe for clients to get involved and invest in BIM not at the end of the building project but the very beginning. Using BIM to create ultimately digital twins can improve building quality, significantly reduce building lifecycle costs, better understand design projects from beginning to end, optimize operational efficiencies and increase occupancy and property yields.

Challenge

Collaborative approaches have been proven to succeed in reducing risks and improving value on construction projects in the public sector and the private sector at a time of uncertainty concerning rapidly increasing material and labour costs.

Impact

Increasing labour and material costs are having a direct impact on tender prices. This is a crisis in the sector that is jeopardising key Government initiatives, such as house building and national infrastructure projects.

Importance

Technologies can be deployed to better weather inflationary pressures. For example, simulation technologies can be used to better predict construction costs before projects commence on site. AI-based software and data analytics can help to close the information gap and provide real-time cost information and alter business leaders to sudden changes in regulations or costs.

Automation technologies also have the potential to improve greater efficiencies and increase work capacity without spending a significant amount on labour costs.

Challenge

Our industry is challenged by a requirement to create a greener more sustainable built environment where we need to move towards capturing whole-life carbon to support a net future for buildings we construct.

Impact

The amount of carbon emissions trapped in our atmosphere causes global warming, which causes climate change. Carbon emissions associated with the construction, buildings, and infrastructure sectors account for approximately a third of Ireland's emissions.

Importance

There are a variety of technologies that can be used to strip carbon out of construction emissions as well as remove carbon that's already in the air, however, the technology is relatively underdeveloped. The key is to extract the carbon from the atmosphere and store it permanently in the ground. This is probably one of the single biggest challenges facing the construction sector. It's one challenge to "measure" carbon it's quite another to "capture" it and "reduce" its impact on our environment. A whole life approach is needed to the solution.

Challenge

Construction has been one of the slowest industries to integrate technology into its workflow. There remains a heavy dependency on paper-based processes. Moving from on-site management to remote working presents several challenges for construction companies.

Impact

Coronavirus has changed the workplace for everyone, construction companies are looking to grow their remote workforce and are seeking technology to help them manage their daily workflows. Companies are scrambling to figure out how to manage remote staff, maintain project productivity, and keep the bottom line intact.

Importance

Technology offers several solutions that can help construction companies maintain their productivity without affecting project quality, all while maintaining safety and health requirements. Project management software, cloud-based document control, time tracking software, project reports etc. are all solutions that can lead to improved efficiencies and productivity. Technology is currently present to save time, eliminate rework, reduce paper and printing costs, improve accountability and ultimately save the environment.

Challenge

Preventing another Grenfell Tower disaster depends on a major overhaul of construction procurement practices, breaking away from the adversarial ‘race to the bottom’ through which low prices undermine safety and quality.

Impact

Future procurement in construction should be linked to the safety approvals of any 'in scope' project so that teams will be selected on value criteria including the safety of designs, works, and products. Contractors and suppliers will be appointed early on a conditional basis, to improve and agree on safety proposals and reduce risks. Teams will be integrated through collaborative contracts.

Importance

Modern procurement practice recognises the importance of sharing accurate and complete project information and the use of digital information management tools for the creation, sharing, storage, and use of project information. Digital information can improve whole life asset management, in particular, BIM can be used to improve collaborative procurement relationships. Digital twins can help create a mirror image of a building incorporating multiple data sources which can be assembled and analysed by AI. The industry to make sense of an ocean of data and that means we have to apply AI. The digital twin could mean that insurers are on the brink of peering into the near future and spotting disastrous events before they unfold with tragic human consequences.

Challenge

Improving Data capture and its utilisation on a construction project enables agile management. Construction projects are synonymous with significant delays and cost overruns with the additional challenges of labour shortages, rising costs of materials, and energy costs.

Impact

Leveraging data efficiently on construction projects through digital technologies would improve collaboration and integration of processes to increase productivity and create a more sustainable industry.

Importance

The combined use of available technology coupled with extensive user and industry research can create interactive real-time accessible dashboards providing real-time access to project KPIs. Current camera, sensor, scanning, and BIM technologies when combined and interoperable can provide a significant return on investment. Sensors and trackers can be installed at multiple points: at gates, in vehicles, on equipment and materials to monitor in real-time progress and productivity.

Challenge

The off-site construction debate is gaining significant traction globally and its importance has been elevated by the coronavirus outbreak. The challenge is can we deliver the pipeline of homes envisaged in Ireland’s Hosing for All Plan by building off-site at scale.

Impact

The move to off-site can bring many benefits i.e. reduction in build time, reduction of risk of time and cost overruns, increased safety of workers, less waste, and versatility.

Importance

Taking construction offsite and into a manufacturing environment opens the door to standardised designs, streamlined processes, and automated production techniques incorporating advanced robotics and the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT). Cloud computing also typically opens up the possibility of far more complex processing being undertaken because of the extent of the processing capacity and tools available in the cloud. AI adoption in the off-site industry in its use of BIM, data analytics, sensor networks, and IoT devices.

Challenge

Developing a single digital planning system where planning applications could be submitted directly into an accessible-to-all digital database, enabling real-time and cross-referenceable access to all applications at any stage of the process.

Impact

Ireland needs to give communities easier ways to engage with a system that can often prove challenging to navigate and understand. We need to give planning authorities the tools to create and shape their places and we need to give developers confidence and certainty that Ireland is open for business.

Importance

Our planning system needs a state-of-the-art digital planning system that is easy to use, be joined up, and intuitive. It should have a find and explore, engage and get involved feature and also possess track and forecast functionality. A fit-for-purpose model will develop a modular digital planning platform underpinned by common standards, tools, platforms, and next generation technologies including core capabilities allowing planners to prepare and present spatial plans, manage their cases, collaborate effectively, and track planning KPIs.