Geoff Roberts, director of industry and innovation for Oracle Construction and Engineering, discusses sustainable construction practices and innovative technologies including autonomous drones and virtual reality, which are all part of its industry lab where the "mission has been to grow the construction vision of the future for the whole industry". Roberts is a chartered surveyor with more than 40 years’ experience in all aspects of project management and project controls.
Can you describe the mission of the Oracle industry labs and the focus of the UK lab?
"The overall lab mission has been to grow the construction vision of the future for the whole industry, both owners and delivery partners. More importantly, it's enabling a safe area that's near real world for co-innovation between not only our partners, but ourselves and our partners, and perhaps our partners and their customers.
"In terms of how we've translated that into the UK lab, it's more the European and Middle East lab that happens to be located in the UK. It's very much a themed lab around sustainability, mobility, and accessibility. It’s also about the full end-to-end lifecycle of transportation.
"It's about how we make transportation sustainable, and we built the whole facility in a sustainable way. What we showcase is a lot of partner innovation and capability around sustainability. In terms of projects and assets, it’s how we think about the full lifecycle of transportation.
"From home through transport to a train station, and then the last mile to the office. How that all interacts in terms of accessibility and then mobility. And again, how do we interact with the 5G network. So that's how we're overlaying our thinking around the mission and what the theme is for the European and Middle East lab.
"Ultimately it’s about data and enabling construction professionals to make better informed decisions by bringing together the Oracle Smart Construction Platform and innovation partner data."
When you go to the lab, what are your impressions? What do you see?
"I've been involved in the lab from day one. I was involved right up from the first phase of the Oracle industry lab in Chicago. I've always seen a vision for how we can showcase the construction of the future.
"We can't be everything to everyone, so therefore we work with partners as do our customers. What we're doing is showcasing capability. It's what type of innovation that partners bring to the table that is the value add. The incremental benefit is what all construction organisations are looking to do. And that's what I see as huge. The reason for growing these labs is to help construction in Europe and the Middle East to grow."
What are some of the most pressing topics today in engineering and construction? And how will the labs and the summits help to answer them?
"There's a significant number, but if you think about the main ones, there's offsite manufacturing, so it's about being more precise with a more manufacturing-based approach; that's a productivity thing.
"Productivity, as we know, in construction is poor, and we must improve that. And offsite manufacturing has become one of those potentials that offers incremental gain. There’s collaboration; though collaboration has been driven significantly by the pandemic, it's about reducing the need for people to work face to face and onsite. The more we change that, the better. So, collaboration is big.
"Also, what can I do with video images and point clouds where I can't do with putting a human in that space to do that measurement? Often, it's more accurate with automated tools. Ultimately, the big one that everybody is still focused on is ensuring that the workforce that arrives in the morning is exactly the same workforce that goes home at night. Safety should be paramount in all of our thinking and in construction."
(Hosted by Geoff Roberts, director of industry and innovation for Oracle Construction and Engineering, the summits are set for April 17, 19, and 21 at the Oracle Industry Lab in Reading, UK. The day-long summits, which will feature Oracle innovation partner presentations and demonstrations of the Oracle Smart Construction Platform, are planned to occur around Oracle CloudWorld in London on April 19.)
Dancing robot dogs, hovering drones, and virtual reality headsets
Dancing robot dogs, hovering drones, and virtual reality headsets marked the opening of Oracle’s new industry lab outside Chicago, where hundreds of people were – in April 2022 – able to touch, hear, and see the latest technologies for construction and engineering, energy and water, communications, and manufacturing.
The first phase of the industry lab opened in 2018, and the original lab focused only on the construction industry. Consisting of an outdoor worksite and a construction trailer, visitors could see and experience construction technology that would revolutionise the industry.
Now, the next phase of the lab is open in an airplane-hangar-sized building that showcases emerging tech, such as drones, the internet of things (IoT), 5G, and robotics used to solve real customer problems. Though it now has a broader industry vision, it can still immerse visitors in the construction site of the future.
Pepper Construction worked with Oracle to expand the lab, using technology from many of the more than 30 industry partners that are now showcased in the lab.
“Phase 1 looked like a half-finished project, with a trailer office and a bunch of equipment and I beams,” says Burcin Kaplanoglu, vice president of innovation for Oracle Industry Labs. “The entire project has modelled the course of a construction site, from a worksite with a trailer to a modern building that features the latest technologies.”
The first phase allowed Pepper and Oracle team members to work with core Oracle technologies and as many as 14 partner technologies, using what they learnt to build phase 2. “We were actually physically doing it, not just talking about it,” says Kaplanoglu.
Building for the future
For Jennifer Suerth, Pepper Construction’s vice president of technical services, the lab isn’t just a construction site – it’s an engine for new ideas. Building the lab allowed her team to experiment with construction technologies that they continue to use for other projects, such as Reconstruct, which uses cameras to capture the status of a building in progress, then produce a 3D model and place the model on a timeline against the project schedule.
One of the first participants in the Oracle for Startups programme and an Oracle industry lab partner from the very start, Reconstruct CEO Zak MacRunnels describes the lab’s grand opening as “bright”.
After two years of demonstrating Reconstruct’s SaaS offering via Zoom, people were excited to participate in an immersive experience. “We were pretty isolated during Covid and to see new technologies in the flesh was different than seeing new technologies on Zoom,” says MacRunnels.
“Being in the physical lab made the software come to life.” Pepper Construction used the Reconstruct platform to visually merge all of the data in one place, including drone, 360-degree photography, and scan data. “Reconstruct really helps drive decision-making around the schedule, the production, and where you’re headed,” says Suerth. “It’s very fascinating, and I think very valuable.”
An incubation lab for industry
Initially, a lot of construction industry technology was focused on the back office, such as task planning and building information modelling (BIM). The Oracle industry lab shifts the focus to the worksite.
"We are literally making a difference to the workers in the field," says Suerth, who speaks with Pepper’s safety coordinator on a frequent basis. During construction, omnipresent webcams and periodic drone scans made it easier for remote workers, including architects located out of state, to get up close with the building’s progress.
Covid-19 accelerated the adoption of technology in the construction industry, says Suerth. “Covid forced people to use technology because they had no other choice,” she says. “Then once they started using it they realised, ‘Oh, this isn't so bad after all.’ Now they want more.”
The result is a facility that not only incubates promising technologies and technology integrations, but also lets construction leaders immerse themselves in the solutions that are changing the industry. “For this industry, seeing is believing,” says Roz Buick, senior vice president, product, strategy and development, Oracle Construction and Engineering. “They've been very hands-on for many, many years. This is where we show customers how it all can come together.”
One technology that catches everybody’s eye is Boston Dynamics’ Spot, the robotic dog that can traverse an obstacle-filled worksite and go up and down stairs while taking 360-degree scans of its environs.
Suerth’s advice: introduce workers to Spot early in the project, since they’re sure to cluster around the robot when it first appears to take photos and watch it move. “But the longer he was there, people started treating Spot like a worker,” she says, “walking around him, waiting for Spot to pass.”
Showcase new integrations and capabilities
The 30,000-sq-ft lab will be followed by other Oracle industry labs, including the aforementioned sustainability and mobility lab in Reading, and a construction industry lab in Sydney, Australia.
The labs are providing Oracle technologists and customers with places to explore solutions to real-world problems and showcase new integrations and capabilities. And they’re not just prototypes – 80 to 90% of the technologies used at the lab are commercially viable.
“Instead of technology chasing a problem, we start with a problem our customers bring us and figure out the technologies, Oracle’s and partners’, that will solve it,” says Kaplanoglu. “It’s not a demo centre. It’s a lab we use to solve customer problems.”
MacRunnels is encouraged by what he’s hearing now from his customers. Eight years ago, only early adopters were using digital technology designed specifically for the construction industry. Now, it’s a competitive necessity.
“They’re saying, ‘I need this to run my business. I can't just eyeball it and use paper and send my teams out there and trust that everything is going great,’” says MacRunnels. “They’re seeing amazing opportunities for efficiencies, and more than that, they’re seeing how these technologies can change people’s lives.”
Enhancing smart construction platform with new analytics capabilities
Separately, engineering and construction organisations struggle to unlock data across applications to effectively diagnose problems, predict risks, and inform future actions.
To address this challenge, Oracle recently announced Oracle Construction Intelligence Cloud Analytics. The solution combines data from Oracle Smart Construction Platform applications to give owners and contractors a comprehensive understanding of performance throughout their operations.
With this insight, organisations can quickly spot and correct issues and target ways to drive continuous improvement across project planning, construction, and asset operation.
Learn more about Oracle Smart Construction Platform
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” says Roz Buick, senior vice president of product, strategy, and marketing for Oracle Construction and Engineering.
“The new Oracle Construction Intelligence Cloud Analytics offering combined with the Smart Construction Platform’s predictive intelligence engine and common data environment, gives our customers a deeper, holistic understanding of their performance. Now they can build unique data strategies that drive competitive differentiation. This is how the construction industry will get to six sigma precision like its industrial and manufacturing counterparts.”
The Smart Construction Platform unites capabilities from Oracle engineering and construction applications and third-party solutions with a common data environment and user experience.
With the platform, owners and contractors can more easily work together to improve decision-making at every level of their organisations.
“We are increasingly focused on finding new and better ways to leverage our data to gain further insights into project performance and risk,” says Brian Neal, project manager, Rudolph Libbe Inc.
“Connecting and blending data for analysis will provide the broadest and deepest view into our operations, helping us to understand trends across our business and identify ways to keep improving how we deliver projects for our customers.”
Smart construction platform: Unifying people, processes, and data
The Smart Construction Platform brings together the core applications, processes, and data that owners and contractors need to work together across project and asset lifecycles. These include portfolio planning, bid/tender processes, contracts, schedules, project documents and BIM collaboration, field tasks, costs, and payments.
With the new unified experience, common data environment, and cross-application interoperability, users can easily move between applications and data sets while working within a single project.
By synchronising activities, resources, and data as each project and asset progresses, the platform helps ensure teams across disciplines are always working towards the same goal, with the same information.
For instance, the platform’s scheduling and project management capabilities synchronise planning and worksite teams around a master plan, giving both visibility into a unified schedule and the task data needed to do the right work in the right place at the right time.
So, if an HVAC installation should change because of a supply chain issue, the project manager will automatically receive the updated schedule information and can coordinate any needed adjustments across all impacted teams.
Likewise, the platform gives capital planners accurate, timely data on project forecasts so they can align with managers on budget requirements and adjust as strategic priorities change.
For example, inflation doubles the costs of a required set of materials on a project. The project manager can push those new actuals and forecast up to the planner who can perform just-in-time changes to the portfolio, possibly pulling funds from a less important project, or putting a project on hold.
And as the platform continually learns and gets smarter using machine learning technologies, it will take these past actions into consideration to flag potential risks and guide more informed decision making in the future. These are just a few of the many connected experiences the platform can deliver by:
- Providing up-to-date schedule data to project managers so they can keep teams aligned to planned delivery dates and other schedule requirements;
- Uniting planning (CPM schedule) with worksite teams (task schedule) to minimise wasted time and resources;
- Letting capital planning and project execution teams exchange budget and actual cost data, enabling both teams to confidently adjust as work progresses;
- Automatically storing completed bid/tender packages as well as approved invoices and other payment materials in organisations’ document registers;
- Giving all stakeholders visibility to collectively track progress, identify and mitigate risks, and efficiently manage change across the entire supply chain.