Who Will Be the Next Kodak in the Construction Industry?

Everyone knows the story of the giant Kodak that went bankrupt — with a digital camera well hidden in the basement, they tried to suppress the technology. In today's construction industry, a lot is happening, but we lag far behind most other industries. Looking at McKinsey reports from 2015, the construction industry ranks second to last, just above "Agriculture and Hunting" in digitalization. Are we keeping up?

We have some professional groups that are more exposed than others, and it is clear we have a lot to learn from other industries. Standardization and reducing man-hours is a challenge we have been trying to solve for a long time. The challenge, beyond costs, is the topic of project completion. We say the building is finished, but the fact is that we very rarely finish on time, and there are far too many defective deliveries.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one most adaptable to change."

-Charles Darwin

Looking at the number of hours spent on value-creating activities, the gap between the average is very large, and it also appears to have a negative trend. In such times, disruption comes to the fore.

The ITB role has arrived to try to solve the problem of buildings that do not function properly from the outset, and to "own" or assign ownership of the various technical actors, as there are often 2-15 trades involved in individual technical components. If standardization had been solved, we might have managed without this resource on certain projects. But I personally agree that the ITB role is necessary and cost-saving today, especially where the client contracts parties under a standard design-and-build contract.

"The ITB coordinator is generally not the long-term solution. It is like bailing out a sinking boat instead of repairing the hole."

I have looked at an industry I hold very dear, but fear will face a significant challenge in the future due to the required digitalization, as well as expectations for new technology and increasingly simple user interfaces.

Is the BMS becoming obsolete?

In the early 1990s, you really had to work hard to get a BMS into a building. The building owner had to understand why this was a necessity. Fortunately, some lines in the technical regulations described that buildings should be controlled energy-efficiently, and then the BMS became self-evident in larger buildings.

Previously, a functioning BMS was absolutely critical to whether a building was energy-efficient, and I have personally been involved in saving 30 to 40% on certain buildings that had no BMS.

Today, technical systems have become increasingly stand-alone. Ventilation systems are now mostly delivered with internal automation, and there are even recognised sub-stations within the internal automation. The argument about flexibility is therefore completely gone. Furthermore, heating systems come with ready-made automation that also works completely stand-alone, often with more functionalities than the BMS had, including water flow data from pumps, existing temperature sensors on pumps, and so on.

Today, a lot is delivered in duplicate at component level, and why is this? We need to simplify, but is there simply a lack of competence among the actors? After an inspection of a commercial building, I came across a solution that is unfortunately not unusual. This is a refurbishment carried out 2 years ago.

Here, 3 different systems have been delivered that do not communicate with each other, and this was done to "save" money.

There is a system controlling the ventilation unit, a separate stand-alone system controlling the cooling baffles, the BMS monitors, and the radiators are controlled manually. All of these can also be controlled and have adjustable setpoints, so you wonder who the users end up pressing? During the inspection we were cooling, had ventilation closed, and had the radiators running at full blast.

This is not an unusual sight, and I believe that when we as an industry do this, we have failed.

I come from the BMS industry and have worked with BMS for 12 years and am a BMS advocate at heart, but that does not mean I must fight tooth and nail for outdated protocols that require enormous amounts of engineering time, which in turn is expensive. It means I fight for energy-efficient buildings that should be controlled correctly, and in that way they become smart. And it is precisely such solutions that make people choose to build in a smart way.

I have previously controlled pumps and heating systems in a BMS, but after seeing how the new stand-alone systems work, I do not understand why we still allow the entire pump automation to be disconnected and replaced with contactors switching on and off with a "smart alternation" for twin-pump configurations. Why do we bring in extra sensors when we already have many sensors we can "talk" to?

The answer may be because we have too many protocols and gateways to deal with. I was long an advocate for BACnet and have taken the certification in "German-English", but time has moved on and BACnet has not. Looking at "Smart by Powerhouse", they implicitly state that to reach level 3, only open APIs are acceptable and IT must compensate for missing security. Is it then right to try to fix BACnet, or should one move to a standardized IT language?

Over the past year, I have worked on many smart projects, including Atea's smart building in Stavanger. Here the real estate industry was seen as a very important actor, but with many closed protocols. They chose to standardize on IP and open API at the top level. This meant the suppliers originally intended for the job were replaced to bring in those willing to embrace this change. I also find this very strange — why would one not want to be part of this change?

With more and more standardized systems, the BMS essentially becomes a SCADA/top system (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) — a place to visualize and process data leading to "big data" and machine learning.

When it comes to user-friendliness, overview, intuitive user experience and mobile-friendliness, you can judge for yourself based on the image on the left taken from a municipality's specification document.

The data in the BMS is also the most important data you have in a building for energy and indoor climate. This is data you need to read/write to if you want to eliminate duplicate components, and to be able to use smart office solutions so that building users can be in focus.

Looking at companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Atea and Telenor, these are companies in a completely different class when it comes to data and visualization. They have dedicated departments working exclusively on visualization and how to understand data without specialist knowledge. How will IT affect this industry? Will BMS be consumed? Will there be collaboration? Or will it become a battle in different directions?

The competence that BMS engineers have is, in my opinion, completely unique! Who in the construction industry has such cross-disciplinary competence — someone who must understand what all the other technical trades do in order to tie it all together? If I were a building owner, I would hire BMS engineers 10 out of 10 times! I actually did so myself when I was a technical property manager. I strongly believe that this competence will be a driver for innovation, but perhaps as supporters, building owners and advisory competence.

Who do you think will be the next Kodak in the construction industry?

‍