Telematics in Construction: A Panel Discussion

Description

Telematics and data analytics have successfully generated value in several sectors, including manufacturing, logistics, and retail; unfortunately, the construction sector appears to be lagging behind other sectors when it comes to data integration and deployment of analytics solutions. The fragmented nature of the construction supply chain and the lack of agreed standards across partners appear to be the key factors that prevent release of value. In response of the above challenges, Costain and the University of Edinburgh Business School organized the workshop “Telematics in Construction: A Panel Discussion” to: • bring together multiple stakeholders, i.e. plant manufacturers, subcontractors, and telematics providers, who generate and/or consume telematics data; • investigate what telematics solutions these partners currently offer and/or exploit; • elicit use cases that may release value via integration and exploitation of telematics data across the construction supply chain. Beside Costain, workshop participants included five plant hire companies, three plant manufacturers, and two telematics providers; which gives a comprehensive and representative sample of stakeholders across the whole construction supply chain. The discussion confirmed that there are currently multiple heterogeneous reporting systems/tools that are not integrated with each other. Data integration is currently a challenge due to a lack of telematics data exchange standards; the AEMP standard v2.0 aims to address this problem, but this standard is still being developed. Finally, there is a general tendency towards “reactive” decisions, e.g. machine requests from (sub)contractors to plant hire firms placed at the very last minute (i.e. Friday for next Monday), which witness lack of integration across the supply chain. When it comes to use cases related to exploiting and generating value from telematics data, there appears to be a consensus across supply chain partners. Our discussion consistently led to a central use case Asset Utilisation, which includes two other key use cases: Asset Scheduling and Asset Monitoring; a third use case, Asset Usage Pattern Identification groups these higher-level uses by leveraging on so-called ‘data mining’. Recommendations stemming from the discussion carried out are the following: • leverage on the AEMP v2.0 standard to ensure data integration; • extract and share project plan information, i.e. activities and resource requirements, in a standard format, to make sure that orders for plants are raised with sufficient notice, i.e. two weeks, given to plant hire subcontractors; • develop a dashboard, possibly integrated in EnableMyTeam Supply Chain Mapping Tool, to present the aforementioned data in a customized way to different supply chain partners; • build a portfolio of case studies that provide proof-of-concept for use cases identified during the workshops.

Period	2 Nov 2015
Event type	Workshop
Location	Edinburgh, United KingdomShow on map