Our first conversation was with Oliver Glockner, «Director Innovation» of the Hilti Group. He told us that digitalisation plays a central role at Hilti and is present in every area of the company. It begins with recognising customer needs, extends through the development and manufacture of the products and reaches as far as marketing. Across all these fields the aim is to become faster, more agile and more adaptable. He emphasised that driving digitalisation forward is thoroughly desired at Hilti and that ideally it should be anchored in all business areas.
Regarding the extent to which digitalisation changes the demands placed on employees, Mr Glockner reported that the use of technology on construction sites has so far been rather limited. In future, however, there will be more digital solutions such as apps and less paper. Accordingly, more people who can also handle such technologies will be needed. It is good and helpful that many people use these technologies privately as well, so that the basics of handling apps, for example, are already there. For those who have been in the trade longer, however, it is quite an adjustment.
With regard to more complex technologies, more people with the relevant skills are of course needed in the firms carrying out the work - people who act, as it were, as an interface between the device and the work to be done and who are familiar with «both languages». With AI, for example, you also have to know where the possibilities and the limits lie; what works, what does not, how the technology is applied, how results are evaluated and, finally, communicated correctly. Future job profiles will accordingly be considerably more technology-oriented.
We went on to touch on the topic of the skills shortage in the construction industry and asked whether new technologies, and the new areas of work and responsibility associated with them, might also offer a way of drawing young people into the construction industry. Mr Glockner was convinced of it, since the new technologies are appealing and attractive. You can also see that in the lively start-up scene in the construction industry, which did not exist in this form before. There are many investments, including in the venture capital field, an active search for opportunities for innovation and increasingly interdisciplinary teams: experts from software and IT are now involved too, so that the same perspective does not always prevail and you can benefit from different ways of thinking. Mr Glockner emphasised that developments in construction have tended to progress rather slowly, so that it is justified that a little more is finally happening.
Asked about innovations that specifically appeal to young people, he named BIM above all. It makes clean planning in 3D possible, with data directly available and without the same work having to be done several times. What might appeal above all to younger people is that the whole thing has a «touch of gaming» about it. Overall, new technologies make work on the construction site less strenuous and more fun. A lot can also be automated and back-breaking work made easier; measuring, for example, can be done with a robot instead of a folding rule, or overhead drilling, which is regarded as particularly strenuous, can be taken over by a drilling robot.
After gaining an insight with Oliver Glockner into the digitalisation processes at a leading Swiss company such as Hilti, we held a number of conversations in various construction trades - and gained interesting impressions of how digitalisation is perceived on site at the construction site. While at the management and organisational level people are evidently very positive about implementing digital processes and are actively promoting them, putting them into practice currently seems to be somewhat more difficult.
A plasterer told us about an attempt to handle all reporting in their business via a tablet. He found it rather cumbersome, however, since he had to carry the tablet with him all the time while at the same time wanting to protect it from dirt and damage. There had also been digital planning in their company at one point, but it had not really become established. They would tackle it again next year. Asked in which areas digital support would be helpful, he was of the opinion that none was really needed. He did agree, however, that digitalisation will progress and that digital processes will change the tasks and fields of work in the construction industry. Beyond that he was convinced that construction trades could become more attractive to younger generations as a result, since those age groups are more digitally minded.
The conversations we had with a road builder and a bricklayer can be summarised as showing that they are open to digital technologies and would see them as easing their working day, which is in many respects physically demanding. However, it also emerged from the conversations that digital processes have so far become established relatively little. Beyond that, the initial phase with new technologies is often quite difficult, since at first it takes more time until people know how to handle them and the added value becomes apparent.
What became clear from these conversations is that there is a relatively large gap in how the opportunities and potential of digitalisation in construction are assessed. While at the planning and management level people see the opportunities of digital technologies very strongly, view their implementation positively and look extremely confidently towards a digital future, in practice digital processes have so far been felt to be of little help.
Certainly the conversations, in the way we conducted them, cannot be regarded as entirely representative, since we drew primarily on small construction sites, for example. Nevertheless a tendency can be discerned whereby strong confidence prevails at management level and greater scepticism at the level of those carrying out the work regarding the possibilities of digitalisation. There thus appears to be a large gap between what is theoretically possible and what is actually implemented in practice.
Finally we would like to thank Oliver Glockner and everyone who took part in our conversations for sharing their impressions of digitalisation with us.
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