Is the construction industry ready for the 21st century? Contractors are often criticised for being too stuck in their ways, but when you look at the range of software out there it's not surprising that they like to stick with what they know works best. B&E asks what the software industry is doind to make itself attractive to contractors.

THE PROBLEM with software is that its providers forget that we don’t all work in the same way. In fact, its beauty is that it accommodates the quirks in our personal approaches to how we use computers, and gives us freedom to work how we like. The big issue for software manufacturers is accommodating the different ways we use applications, from the way we file our work to how we use complex programmes on, for example, engineering projects.

Construction and the electronic age
If the construction industry has been generally slow to drag itself into the electronic age, the fault may lie with software providers themselves. “At IBM, I found the difficulty with the software industry is all too often people create a piece of software, they create a mystique around it and charge the earth for it,” says Bloomfield. “It’s not surprising that people are reluctant to buy it.”

The way to change the industry is to adopt a gentle approach to your client, Bloomfield adds: “When you come in to change the status quo, you have to do it very carefully and sensibly. You’re going to change the way a business performs, and people become confused with the rate of change.”

Mangofile produces a filing system to clear up the mountains of paper construction companies accumulate during the course of their business. When a contractor completes a building, the paperwork has to be stored for as long as the building is still standing. Bloomfield says the industry has stuck to the same archaic way of storing that information. “What you’re looking at in many cases is the same filing system as Charles Dickens used,” he says.

Carillion moves paper mountain
Carillion approached Mangofile when the company wanted to find a different way of storing data. Under its old, manual system, the firm spent £1m a year on filing its paperwork. “Carillion came to us and said they have a paper problem and they were not sure about how to manage it,” says Bloomfield. “It wasn’t the physical storage, but the retrieval that was costing so much. A man with a van would drive to where the documents were stored, find the piece of paper he wanted and drive it to the people who needed it.”Bloomfield says Mangofile took a -softlysoftly” approach when it introduced new filing software to the contractor. “Carillion already had the hardware like photocopiers and computers,” he says. “We gave them some software and let them get on with it gradually over a period of time. You’ve just got to let it take over until someone says, ‘We must be mad not using it.’” When Carillion finishes a job, all the documents from that project are stored on a CD Rom, which they update in Wolverhampton. That includes drawings, accounts and all the other documents.

Speed means peace of mind
Bloomfield says the speed that contractors can retrieve documents electronically gives them the advantage when they find themselves the subjects of litigation. Because all the documents for a particular project are stored in the same place, companies can retrieve all the documents on that job in seconds. Having all the documents from a certain job can also help contractors to deal with late payers.

With Mangofile’s system, the invoice is sent directly by email. Contractors can put a note on the document so the next person who makes contact with that company will know what the conversation was about. “Margins are tight,” says Bloomfield. “Everybody wants to get the edge on the competition, and construction companies can find themselves employing ten people to chase invoices because their suppliers are lousy payers.”

Individual, or collective interest?
Software designers tread a fine line between building in the flexibility to their products for people to adapt them to their working days, and creating something that is universally used. One of the big criticisms of construction industry software is that it lacks conformity – two engineers could be working on the same kind of project on completely different packages.

Autodesk Emea structural engineering manager John Adams tells B&E the software used is different at different parts of a project. Architects and engineers have very different requirements, and the software they use has evolved in completely different ways, he says. Engineers use complex analysis packages, which take into account the forces at work within a building’s structure, whereas a draftsman will use simpler design packages such as AutoCAD.

Where design meets analysis
Adams says the company is getting the industry to use the same kind of software in different ways to create some unity in the construction process. “Engineers have always been more aware of 3D than architects,” he says, “because they have to be able to prove that the building will stand up. The engineer might be looking at one part of the building and they can analyse that and see how it reacts in different conditions.”

Adams adds that engineers can even use more than one package in the same office. This, he says, can prove costly to the companies using the software. “The problems with using more than one application are the training time and the resource availability,” he says. “Another is re-entering the information because different products very often don’t speak to one another, and then there’s always the risk of mis-keying the information.”

Engineers are finding their time is consumed with data input instead of getting on with what they are qualified to do. “This is what we call 'lowvalue’ information,” Adams says. “It’s not what the architects and engineers were trained to do, and it’s not very motivating work. Engineers do it because they have always done it like that.”

The company has developed a package in which engineers can create their own structural models or they can work on top of the architect’s two-dimensional CAD files. “It’s the sort of thing engineers can pick up and use,” he says. “It makes sense to them. They can very quickly understand it and this saves them time and effort.”

Adams says engineers are far from nervous when it comes to using new software. “They’re not being conservative with the projects they’re trying it out on,” he says. “People are saying they’re already very good at doing simple projects, so they want to try this new software out on something more difficult. The alternative we’re offering is not to replace their analytical tools. They know how the analytical tools work and they’re very familiar with them; to take them away they would be very upset.”

Perhaps the construction industry is generally slow to pick up on new software, not because it is scared of change, but because it likes to stick to what it knows can get jobs done. After all, the language and culture of the construction and software industries couldn’t be further apart, so it is not surprising that a builder might find difficulty taking a computer programmer seriously.

But what is apparent is that the software industry is taking steps to make itself more accessible to contractors. It realises its own failings, and wants to mould itself around an already successful sector to create an even more dynamic industry. Perhaps we shouldn’t ask whether the construction industry has reached the 21st Century yet. Rather, we should ask: Is the 21st Century ready for construction?

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