Rising costs and lack of skilled professionals hindering construction’s efforts to digitise and meet ESG goals, according to RICS.
Chartered surveyors across the world have highlighted that cost and a lack of skilled professionals are not only hampering workloads but are also holding back the construction sector from progressing in terms of innovation and sustainable practices, detailed in the first RICS Digitalisation in construction report.
The report, which gathered responses from over 2,500 members worldwide, set out to assess how advanced practices like BIM and digital twins were used within organisations, looking at their current use, the resulting improvements and some of the challenges that were holding firms back from advancements in the latest technologies.
Whilst companies look to adapt to address the latest world challenges, including reducing the construction sector’s carbon emissions (~40%) – almost all respondents (95%) highlighted costs as a medium to high blocker to their implementation. Somewhat similar to the RICS Global Construction Monitor results too, a lack of skilled professionals was a close second with 88% reporting the challenge of finding the appropriately skilled professionals to support them.
Whilst cost and skills is a major blocker, data is already being heavily used by organisations to enhance progress monitoring and health, safety and wellbeing across all or most of their projects, with some 44% of respondents reporting this as the main way data and technology is used in the construction sector. At the other end of the scale however, only 23% of respondents said that they use data and technology to help measure the carbon footprint and benchmark and report on all or most of their projects.
However, the transfer of data and information flowing between different participants across the asset lifecycle is encouraging. Indeed, almost half of respondents share their cost estimating data and over 40% share their data and information on health and safety and well-being. However, only one fifth share information on life cycle carbon emissions.
This report highlights the advances that are being made but supports the need for further initiatives across the construction sector to upskill people in new and innovative working practices to help it drive down costs across the board so that it can tackle climate change.
Anil Sawhney, RICS Global Construction and Infrastructure Sector Lead, said: “To address the profound impact of construction on our world, the sector must move even faster to reap the benefits of BIM and digital twins. Digitalisation in construction continues to gather momentum, but like the wider construction sector, adoption of such technologies is being held back by increasing costs and shortage of skilled professionals.
“The sector is agile, but with continual cost and time pressures and frequently criticised lack of spending on research and development the sector runs the risk of being left behind. Whilst standards such as ICMS 3 and professional bodies upskilling members is helping, construction needs more support, whether that’s private investment or Government funding or initiatives to ensure countries can continue to prosper.”
Andrew Knight, RICS Global Data and Tech Lead, added: “Current supply chain issues and soaring costs are yet another aspect the sector is having to urgently address. Coupled with incorporating environment, social and governance (EDG) principles, designing and measuring social value; implementing whole-life and whole-asset thinking; and carbon footprint calculation, benchmarking and reporting across projects the construction sector is in the midst of a perfect storm.”
Whilst early BIM modelling is now commonplace and participants across the asset lifecycle are now sharing information more freely, especially on cost estimation and health, safety and well-being, there’s still a way to go. The power of BIM, with its higher dimensions of time, cost, and sustainability, coupled with digital twins will add the most value over coming years, so long as the sector gets the right support.
Source: Show House News
