McConnell Dowell taps Orange Business Services for smart IoT-based construction solutions

 The construction industry faces significant business and technology challenges. These include equipment and skilled labor shortages, increasingly short project schedules, and rising costs of infrastructure delivery. IoT here is expected to allow construction sites to leverage real-time data feeds to tackle these issues head-on.

IoT is known to enable construction sites to collect and report on real-time information, such as heavy machinery utilization and asset tracking, to enable smarter decision making for operational efficiency, time-saving, and cost reductions.

And this why globally-acclaimed infrastructure construction company, McConnell Dowell has chosen Orange Business Services to design a customized, smart, and scalable IoT solution.

Exploiting IoT, Orange and McConnell Dowell will co-create use case applications from innovation and ideation to platform deployment.

Orange has the expertise to create a flexible, scalable IoT platform to collect, report and visualize real-time information over a private IoT network, focusing on digitizing manual and paper-centric processes and in removing manual tasks from the construction site.

Prior to this smart approach, McConnell Dowell says it could only access reports that were manually collated from physically captured data, which was both time consuming and inconsistent.

With the Orange IoT platform, McConnell Dowell can now access multiple devices and sensors collecting environmental data and measure asset utilization spread across construction sites to harvest data.

This is then sent across a LoRa low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) to the company for analysis, correlating with other environmental data.  Via real-time dashboards, McConnell Dowell can collect telemetry data such as machine movements and track assets onsite allowing project teams to assess the efficiency of machine use and report on individual asset utilization.

McConnell Dowell can also track material such as concrete panels from the manufacturer through transportation and installation. On-site they can then identify each individual panel and take smart decisions, avoiding incorrect placement, rework and project delays. More use cases, business applications and new construction site rollouts are planned across the business.

Rhys Craigie, Alliance Systems Manager, McConnell Dowell, says that infrastructure delivery costs are rising by 8% per annum, and efficient project management directly impacts its business performance. "We are focused on embedding technology in our processes and Orange Business Services proved to be an ideal innovation partner. We are now working jointly to develop solutions that can be used at various project locations for different use cases. Together, we are future-proofing our business through agile, scalable and smart solutions that streamline business insights," remarked Craigie.