How To Tackle Risk and Increase
Productivity in 2023

Chris Cadet:   

Good afternoon and welcome to today’s webinar, brought to you by InEight, How to Tackle Risk and Increase Productivity in 2023. Today’s webinar reflects on how 2022 has redefined the construction sector and what we can expect for the year ahead. We’ll also hear about some of the techniques and tools that can help. So thank you for joining and investing in hour of your day. We’re sure this will be a great session for everyone.

By way of introduction, my name’s Chris Cadet, I’m an account director within InEight and I have the privilege to work with so many of our amazing clients and organizations. I also have the pleasure of moderating today’s webinar and I’ll be joined by a panel of highly experienced industry specialists. So before we kick off though, I’ve just got a few housekeeping reminders.

Let us know you’re here by using the chat box. We can use this feature to chat with other participants, speakers, or leave any comments. We’ll also encourage you to ask questions at any time by placing them into the Q&A function. We’ll be sure to address them throughout the webinar and also perhaps hold them towards the end of the webinar. Lastly and importantly, we’d love to get your feedback via the survey once the webinar has ended.

So now I’d like to introduce the panel and while we do that, we’d also like to bring up a poll as we’d love to hear from our audience on what you think will be the biggest industry challenges for the year ahead. So please go ahead, put your inputs. While you’re doing that, I’ll introduce David Kurtz, who is from GlobalData. David’s the Director of Research and Analysis for Construction Mining and Energy.

We also have with us Ryan Christie-Johnson. He’s from WSP. Ryan’s, the National Executive for Capital Delivery PMO and Project Controls. Today we’ll be hearing from David and Ryan as they talk about the future trends and what we are likely to see, the importance of technologies for owners and contractors so they can stay ahead of the game, ensure capital projects are delivered on time. So David, I might get you to do an introduction.

 

David Kurtz:   

Thanks Chris, and good afternoon everybody. As Chris mentioned, I’m responsible for research and analysis in the construction, mining and energy sectors, so their global data. If you’ve not heard of us, we’re a market intelligence company. We cover a number of different sectors globally, including those plus financial services, technology, consumer goods. Within construction specifically, we specialize in areas like projects, market, company, and also trend tracking.

 

Chris Cadet:  

Thanks, David. Ryan.

 

Ryan Christie-J…:

Thanks Chris. Good afternoon all. Thanks for jumping on. My name is Ryan Christie Johnson. I lead the WSP capital delivery PMO nationally. WSP, we are a major engineering company, but we also operate in the capital delivery space, generally EPCN, PMC, OE, various infrastructure markets, working on everything from sustaining capital up to multi-billion dollar major projects.

 

Chris Cadet:

Wonderful, thank you Ryan. So gentlemen, 2022 was a turbulent year of adjusting forecasts and schedules, changing and managing expectations, material and labor shortages and project delays, all of which have changed how the industry does business. So David, I might start with you. Would you like to share just what you’ve seen from your analysis and research? What have been the greatest industry challenges we’ve seen across APAC in 2022?

 

David Kurtz:

Yes, thanks Chris. Well, there’s a pretty good list of challenges on the screen right now. Certainly, we’ve seen them all manifest themselves across the APAC region. In Australia specifically, we’ve seen inflation double; that’s now almost 8%. Interest rates cut from almost nothing to over 3%. And wage inflation as well, which in the first nine months of last year, ABS reporting wage inflation in the construction market of over 3%, having been just 1% in 2020 and 2% in 2021.

For me, I think the biggest ones, really, that the market’s seen have probably been including materials. And some examples we’ve got on the slide here of material price increases. We can see things like steel product prices went up by about 20% on average last year, although they’ve come off a little bit now, cemented and concrete prices were up by 10%.

Also, there was a peak in terms of oil prices and gas prices as well and not on this slide. We also saw the price of deeds in the Australia go up by about 50% last year. So there’s quite a lot of headwinds in that regard in the construction sector.

Also looking at supply chain, supply chain disruption increased in 2022. On this slide there’s a couple of charts. The one on the left is from the ABSD. Both a survey results really. The one on the left is an ABS survey that they’ve run in selected months. You can see in construction for January and March, 58% of the people they surveyed were experiencing supply chain disruptions in their construction sector. And also quite a lot across all the other sectors as well, showing retail, wholesale, manufacturing, and a fair bit up on where things were in April ’21. Unfortunately, things that came off a little bit in June 2022, which was the most recent study.

On the right-hand side something from global data. We surveyed construction firms regularly. One of the surveys we ran in the middle of last year was just asking them about the impact of supply chain disruptions on their business. And you can see there those in Australasia were reporting a more severe level of impact than those in Asia and globally generally.

Then the third one to mention is labor shortages. So again, from the ABS, they report on the proportion of businesses that report vacancies. On this slide on the left-hand side, you can see for November 2020, 2021 and 2022 how that’s increased. So November last year, 29% of businesses that they surveyed reporting vacancies in the construction sector, well up on 13% in 2020, and 20, 22% in 2021. So yeah, quite a few significant headwinds for the industry last year, Chris.

 

Chris Cadet:  

Interesting. Thanks so much for that. It’s interesting, the poll results actually do validate exactly what your research, even though it’s a much smaller audience. But pretty much the three, materials and labor shortages and supply chain, were three areas that people polled on. So interesting to hear that.

Ryan, I’d be keen for you to share your experience both from WSP what you’re seeing, being on the ground I guess in the industry, and also from your engagements with contractors and owners. What are some of the challenges that they’re faced? Can you talk through some of that?

 

Ryan Christie-J…:   

Yeah, very similar. Very similar. So we’re seeing supply chain inflation, recruitment retention as being key challenges within that current market. I think that slide there, very, very interesting. It talks to just how long it’s taking to get people into roles. And we’re seeing that both in the white collar and the trade space. So for us in that white collar space, high churn, we’re seeing, also a long time to fill the roles. That drives inconsistency in terms of your delivery teams, which in conjunction with all of the change that we’re seeing at the moment, that’s certainly having quite an impact on efficiency.

But if I was to look at it from an owner’s perspective, a lot of the owners delivering capital within Australia at the moment are tied into a multi-year cycle when it comes to tackling these macro challenges. So rethinking their corporate risk profile, modernizing their approach, that just doesn’t happen overnight.

I think we’ve seen things like teams working from home. That has certainly modernized out of necessity through that COVID period. But in terms of how major projects are delivered, that’s got a way to go. So it’s encouraging to see. We’ve got the likes of school infrastructure in New South Wales. They’re pursuing an ambitious program utilizing modern methods of construction.

That’s not been done extensively in Australia I think it’s a great call on their part. The scope of work of that program lends itself to MMC and in doing so, they’re maybe not there yet, but they’re starting to shield themselves from this type of turbulence moving forward. So they’ll create for themselves a competitive and emerging market. They’ll improve repeatability and efficiency in the work that they do.

A lot of the work now gets off sited. So we’ve got less exposure to things like inclement weather. We’ve got less inefficiency. So logistics for example, become more efficient. We’re less reliant on diesel, for example. So there’s a lot of efficiency to be gained there, which starts to protect an organization, or an industry even, from some of the variability we’ve seen in the last couple of years. It also secures supply chain and helps to portion that risk more appropriately because again, you’re less exposed. Less of the building is happening out on site.

I suppose on the flip side, of recent times we’re experiencing a dynamic in Australia with infrastructure dominating construction growth. So more infrastructure, less residential as a result of that massive infrastructure pipeline. So think of roads, rail tunnels combined with a conservative traditional approach to risk allocation. We’ve seen a scenario where our EPC market has been quite stretched.

So there’s been some new entries internationally or from international into the Australian market in that EPC space. But what we’re seeing at the moment and moving forward will be the transport and energy sectors competing for the same major contractors under similar models. Lack of competition in this space, we’re starting to see a bit of that. That’s driving less aggressive pricing from the contractors.

The lower productivity factors mean that labor and trades are actually being tied up by these contractors because the risk of not getting labor is outweighing the inefficiency of holding labor. So we’re seeing that traditional approach to procurement from the owner’s side is driving a behavior within the contractors which is not improving efficiency, and I would suggest is contributing to the labor shortages.

For us, WSP, we’re a people business, so recruitment and retention is critical for us. That’s really our capital. So that’s how we drive efficiency in developing and delivering projects. For us it’s really about leaning on modern ways of working, so having leading process overlaid with the right systems to be a differentiator in a tight market.

 

Chris Cadet: 

Wonderful. Thank you so much. There’s a lot in there. I just do wonder in listening to what you were talking about with some of that resilience and planning that organizations are putting in place is, with the legacy of COVID, whether a lot of that was built up as a form of that in some of the challenges that we are heading into now. They’ve been able to have a bit more preparedness in that respect.

We might have a look at the poll results now whilst I hand over to David. Because David, I am curious, and Ryan touched on it very briefly and we do hear about technology really being able to help address some of these challenge and mitigate some of the risks that people are seeing in the market and planning for it. So are you able to talk about it or if you have much data around what the adoption of technology across this sector looks like or more broadly in terms of a strategy for creating some of these efficiencies and improving on productivity?

 

David Kurtz: 

Yes, Chris. I think first of all, maybe I might just put up this slide which puts into context really the productivity on construction, and also pick up on something that Ryan mentioned earlier. This is ABS data over the last 10 years or so and it’s showing the productivity based on output against hours works for different sectors.

You can see, unfortunately, construction’s there going down over the last eight to nine years and decreasing compared to many of the others, even manufacturing and financial services. So yeah, this isn’t a particularly positive look for construction, but it’s clearly, it’s recognized by the industry. That, from our research and our surveys, is what’s driving investment in technology.

So each year we run surveys of construction companies, and this is global mind you, rather than just APAC and Australia. We’re looking at what are the big drivers for them to invest in digital technologies. Clearly, productivity’s out there, far and away, number one; ahead of things like reduced construction costs and faster construction times.

Another interesting one as well is that competitiveness within the market, which is quite high. We also asked the respondents about where they think they are versus their peers and around 25% openly admit that they are behind their peers in terms of investment in technology. That’s not going to be a particularly great place to be when it’s going to mean a lower productivity, higher costs and slower construction times.

But the areas where people are investing, we’ve seen it most in areas like mobile apps and cloud technology. So helping to make data accessible anywhere in real time for anyone on the project, helping things run much more efficiently and make those productivity improvements.

We’ve also seen the investment in BIM as well rise quite significantly. So about six years ago only 29% of people had invested in BIM to any extent, and now it’s around 70%. Of those that haven’t, around three quarters of those say they’re going to invest in it over the next two years. So that’s quite positive in terms of the trajectory on investment, and particularly important given the issues around productivity.

Also, Ryan’s talking about a lot of investment in infrastructure, and there’s a lot of complex projects as well as major job shortages. I was reading that from Infrastructure Australia saying that they felt there were going to be around 214,000 skilled workers short in 2023 compared to a peak demand of over 440,000. So that’s quite considerable shortfall when this is the sector in Australia and the region generally, which should be the growth sector, given things are still fairly tough in the residential market.

Then just on this as well, that acceleration on technology spending is shown here. So within global data we also look at a number of different technologies and estimate the spending and growth there. You can see the top one is cloud. Spending of around 30 billion is predicted this year, going up to around $45 billion globally by 2026. So it’s quite high growth.

All those technologies growing much faster than the construction sector as a whole. Reasonably high growth as well in IOT and AI and data and analytics. On the data and analytics side, there was a report by McKinsey a few years ago, 2017. They were saying that construction firms could boost their productivity by as much as 50% by using real-time analysis of data.

Then just the last one on the uptake, one of the things that’s been really positive has been over time we’ve seen that the barriers to invest in technology come down. So each year we’ve asked companies about if they’re not investing in technology, what are the factors behind that? So there’s quite a lot of factors in terms of costs and financial constraints. You can see from the bluer bar below the purple one that over time, over the last three years those have come down.

One that’s been quite interesting as well is just the second from bottom, that resistance from workers to adapt to new methods. So much less resistance from people in the sector to be embracing technology. We’re seeing companies making sure that their teams are embracing technology as much as possible. There’s an example, or a company called Govani in 2021 in the UK where they created this digital by desire program within the company. So just making sure everybody across the whole company was embracing digital technology as much as possible.

 

Chris Cadet:

Yeah, it’s certainly good to see some of those barriers on a downward trajectory, which is encouraging, being a technology company naturally, of course. There were two things I really wanted to touch on, Ryan. One of them… And look, productivity no doubt is one of the obvious drivers for adoption of technology. The less obvious one is David shared 30 to 37% I think it was with the driver for competitiveness, and you touched on earlier.

And something that we’re seeing a growing trend of anecdotally within our client base, but talking about technology being a kind of recruitment strategy or an attraction driver. Can you talk a little bit about that, Ryan? And then I’m keen to certainly also hear about some of the technology you’re seeing being deployed out there in the field. But first things first I guess.

 

Ryan Christie-J…:

Yeah, so there’s actually a question in the chat around just picking up on white collar staff leaving Australia. So seeing that they can go and get better salaries elsewhere. So I think, in part, on one side you’ve got quite reasonable working conditions in Australia, particularly with more working from home for that white collar base in particular.

But absolutely, I see the other side of it as being using leading process and really good systems to improve people’s day jobs, in effect. So when it comes to systems, there was a good point there from David around making systems accessible. So in many respects, seeing is believing. That actually touches very much on this slide here, where that limited financial gain in the short term. Yeah, I think that’s a reason, but I think that’s because there’s still at a senior level, executive level, a lack of belief in what the outcome may be.

So what we’re seeing in our space is that, first and foremost, it’s critical that you’re doing the basics right. So a good process, good systems, and most importantly, an engaged business. So getting the business involved, and again, you look at that, there’s that resistance from workers. There’s a lack of awareness.

Really, you’d be amazed how many spreadsheets, Word documents, PDFs, paper forms are still floating around in the industry. The mind boggles, really. But short of having something that actually simplifies someone’s day job, that resistance will be there.

So for us, yeah, it’s that good process, good systems, engaged business. That minimizes that barrier of entry to modern technologies. To me, and for us, digital engineering; so that’s our term for BIM, so it’s really an expansion on BIM. That is the cornerstone. So there’s a huge amount of data rich information that gets generated in the planning and design phases. So it’s a no-brainer to harness that.

The other benefit is you’ve got it in, generally either a two or 3D spatial space so we leverage that. You think of say the reach of InEight Document locally, yeah, there’s a huge data set over many years which could be harnessed for machine learning. So that’s something that we’re starting to invest into is that machine learning and AI but it’s only as good as the data that sits underneath it.

So for us, where we’ve really seen uptake has been in the geospatial space. That’s kind of cracked a nut for us. So projects such as [inaudible], we leveraged this heavily. It gave the teams location based intuitive access to project information in the field. We expanded this.

I know InEight did a presentation on this a week or two back. We expanded this on the P4S program for Sydney Water where we actually had InEight Document connected up to our tool, WSP Create. That’s our geospatial tool.

So if you think of where the majority of construction phase information is actually generated, it’s by the engineers and the supervisors in the field. So with WSP Create, we’ve seen the uptake. Actually, it becomes organic and that’s really where you’ve got to get to.

The compliance, this dramatically improves your compliance once the business wants to actually use it. Once your compliance is up, then your data capture and your cleanliness of data improves dramatically. You can then start to really capitalize on machine learning, AI reporting, that whole space.

Also, what you see is as those systems improve, as the uptake and the compliance hits the levels it needs to, that traditional administrative overlay where you had a paper form and you’ve got an admin who sits over the top and punches that into a finance system or something like that, that starts to go away. So you start to see more efficiency in the way that your site teams operate. Effectively, you’re capturing information once. You’re using it, you’re reusing it, you’re not duplicating it.

This, to me, becomes that impetus to attract and retain talent. The construction industry, I suppose you see people in many different shirts. Quite often people cycle around from major project to major project. If you can provide a great place to work because you’ve got process and system that supports that, then you’re going to get the cream of the crop coming back.

I suppose most importantly though, in terms of where I see the benefit of systems bottom up is the supervisors, the engineers, the efficiency gain in operation of a task that they can gain from good process and good system. That actually frees them up to focus on high value activities. And when we look at a lot of that data that we’re seeing there, and including lower labor productivity, a lot of that comes down to how well we plan, how well we organize, and freeing our people up to I suppose have the bandwidth to be better in that space. That will improve the productivity.

One final bit on that though is I think we’re seeing a bit of a crossover in terms of the drivers. So that to me, that labor productivity dropping over time, I think you would see that that correlates very closely with the big ramp up in infrastructure projects within Australia.

That again ties back to that competition piece that I was talking to earlier. So I don’t think the balance is probably quite right at the moment within the market and, therefore, there’s not enough competition for those major EPCs. Without that competition they’re not driven. They don’t need to invest in technology at a rate that we might have expected.

Even to that point, they can wear a small amount of labor and efficiency because again, it’s better for them to have the labor available than to risk not being able to get it. So I think, as an industry, owners plus the major contractors, there needs to still be that strategic shift in terms of how we deliver projects that drives better competition in that place.

 

Chris Cadet:

Fantastic, thank you. There’s certainly a lot to digest in that, but some very clear messages and some very good ones, and especially around some of the drivers that you’re talking about and the way some of the organizations are addressing that.

Something that you touched on there, I was thinking about the increase in infrastructure projects. And David mentioned earlier about probably that surpassing residential. David, just keen to understand from a global perspective in your research… I know you may not have any slides that talked to this, but how does the APAC region compare. I guess. On a global scale, is the data consistent in terms of not necessarily just the technology approach or adoption or the drivers, but just from where the focus tends to be about infrastructure and how there’s more in that end of the market than in the residential market?

 

David Kurtz:

Yes, Chris, I think just to put up a slide on that one, where we’re showing things at the moment. I think the residential market’s really struggling at the moment. We can see that through rising inflation, interest rates, and that’s not just in Australia. There’s problems across other markets as well.

On the left-hand side you can see the residential market, is a sort of lighter blue dashed line, really dropping in 2022, 2023. We saw it come down by about 2% in real terms last year. We’re forecasting to come down by 6% in real terms this year, 10% in normal terms.

The ABS as well, in the first nine months of last year they were reporting a 20% drop in new housing start. So that sector is really struggling and we’re seeing the same thing in China. I’m sure everyone’s aware of some of China’s struggles in the housing sector with falling housing sales and the issues from the Evergrande default. We’re expecting that to drop off.

Really, it’s that energy and infrastructure space that’s helping a lot of markets to offset some of this decline. Big investments are going into renewables, for example. The power markets is forecast to grow around 5% this year in Australia compared to say 4% for infrastructure.

You can see some big growth in China. A lot of that is the rebound that we’re seeing after the COVID lockdowns in China. So yeah, there’s quite a difference really in terms of those two sectors and how they’re faring at the moment in Asia.

 

Chris Cadet: 

Thank you for that. So we have one sector going down. We have an explosion in the renewable space. Really keen to hear from Ryan in terms of how do we offset that with labor shortages. Are people able to transition in certain roles? Do we rely on other methods, technology methods to help with the explosion of energy and renewable projects across the region, given the very different sectors?

 

Ryan Christie-J…:  

Yeah, A good question. I think the sectors aren’t a particular challenge. The transition will be relatively seamless in terms of resourcing. The challenge in part will be it less centralized. So at the moment you’ve got a lot of work happening in Sydney, for example. So renewables, it will be a bit of a swing back towards the sort of dynamic we’ve previously seen with the resources sector.

So it’ll be more decentralized and that may have a bit of an impact but I wouldn’t expect that it’s anything major. So we’re seeing that renewables and green energy, green industries, so things like pump hydro, hydrogen, green steel, they’re going to play a very big part in the infrastructure pipeline moving forward. They’re generally quite a lot of those are major projects. At least in the near term we would see that they’ll be third party financed. So certainly on a scale which initially diverges from the traditional energy and resources sector.

So financial governance is going to drive that they probably end up with a fairly traditional approach, which means they’re going to leverage that EPC pool that I talked about earlier. So that stretch pool that’s going to get… Let’s say transport is using. The energy sector is going to start to dip into that same pool.

So I think the challenges we’re seeing around productivity, around innovation in that space, they are unlikely to turn around. Interestingly enough, it’s probably the major resource and energy players as they transition their business models and get more into the renewable clean energy space; that they have the experience and they have the capital to deliver major capital investment. So I think they actually have a significant role to play in unlocking how labor is utilized because they’ll be able to take on a different risk profile than finance projects.

So it’d be great to see a disruptive approach. I’d call back to that school’s infrastructure New South Wales piece. A lot of that renewable sector could take that on, but it comes down to centralization of that particular portfolio or market.

So we’ve got a whole lot of disparate projects nominally occurring. It’s not particularly coordinated at the moment. I think we’re going to see labor challenges continue and it’s not until we get that competition right that investment in technology, or technology process et cetera, investment generally back into ways of working is going to improve the challenges we’ve currently seen with labor.

There is a question again in the chat which talks to the government authorities, which I’ve got a bit of experience with. You might too, Chris. What we’re seeing there-

 

Chris Cadet:

[inaudible]

 

Ryan Christie-J…:  

… it fits into the same sort of discussion. At a strategic executive level there has to be buy-in. So it is very challenging within any organization, but particularly a government authority to come in and effect change bottom up. Very much seeing is believing so pilot projects are a great way to get that buy-in.

It needs to be a bit more than a business case. Generally, that’s what we see. We can go in there and say, “Hey, we could do this,” but unless it can be seen, what we’re finding that most owners aren’t jumping necessarily. So it actually comes down to engagement at that strategic level. It’s got to be really a top down. You need that buy-in.

We’ve seen some owners really lean into that of late. But again, that school’s infrastructure New South Wales piece, that is an entire procurement strategy. It’s a ways of working piece that top down is going to drive a huge amount of innovation in supply chain and project delivery. Yeah, you’ve really got to attack that end of town or you’re pushing it uphill, so to speak.

 

Chris Cadet: 

Yeah, we find similar kind of, I guess thought process as well. Change is never easy. Owners have a different mentality I guess sometimes to the private sector with contractors and the way they approach projects and innovation. Some of the business drivers that we look at in terms of competitiveness sometimes doesn’t necessarily apply unless you look at it from a lens of a recruitment or an attraction strategy, bringing technology into an organization.

But certainly from that top down approach is where we find if there’s a vested interest in helping to sponsor driver return on investment in different ways, particularly for government because they look for different things, then there’s opportunities there to bring about that kind of change and certainly in that respect.

So we don’t have any other questions in the chat at this stage. Maybe keen, Ryan, just to maybe talk through… We’ve talked a lot about the challenges and where technology can certainly help. Just wondering if you’ve got any insights around where some of them have had impacts around delivering projects on time and on budget, what we’re seeing around that space.

 

Ryan Christie-J…:

Yeah, so the GIS space we talked to earlier, that that was a good example in terms of uptake and usage. So if you look at delivering on time, on budget, there’s probably, there’s several dynamics you’d look at. But on one hand it’s I suppose preventing rework, improving efficiency in the way we deliver.

Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of benefit in the way that we do that using that WSP Create. So putting that massive information out to the business, but making that accessible in the field. That was one of the key investment drivers that we saw in one of the previous slides, was that investment into mobile technology.

So what we saw there, it was probably an unquantified benefit to those projects in that the planning that went into any given area across a very large project footprint was very effective, was far more agile than it historically would’ve been. That means the rework and the inefficiency that follows from that we didn’t see near as much. So again, it’d be interesting to quantify that as an impact.

On the flip side, where we’re seeing the more traditional sort of project controls space, to me digital engineering is that key lead into that. So having an end-to-end framework along the lines of an ISO9 650 type of framework whereby you’ve got a common set of information, you’re building it once. I think a lot of people have probably seen that sore tooth diagram around information loss.

So being efficient in the way that you generate information during the design phase and then leveraging that consistent information throughout the project. Again, that’s where we’re seeing improvements in terms of time, cost, productivity, because everyone is nominally on the same page and they’re pulling in the same direction.

You’ve got consistency of process because you’ve got it mapped out from day one. That’d be our key I would say, those different spaces, having a clear process and making that readily accessible to the masses.

 

Chris Cadet:

Beautiful. Thank you Ryan. David, as we sort of summarize things a little bit, I might push out, just bring up the final poll results. But just keen David to… So we’ve looked at a lot of the historical analysis on where the market’s changed over the past few years. Any insights that you might be able to share on preliminary findings or anecdotal research around where we might be headed for the next couple of years? Do we see some other significant shifts in some of the data that’s coming through or potential change?

 

David Kurtz:  

Yeah. I think some of the areas we’re expecting to see quite high growth are AI particularly, but also BIM. As more countries and state governments impose this upon particular projects, their expectancy of that accelerates. There’s also, not just in construction but generally, lots of investment going on in predictive maintenance and the importance of technology and safety.

So I think one of the areas the government’s investing in at the moment as part of its roadmap into AI is not just… There’s different areas. There’s energy, there’s health, but there’s also construction. That’s a big area in construction and cities and infrastructures, looking to see how safety can be improved, like collision avoidance for example. Predictive maintenance would also help in terms of productivity.

I’d say just a last point. It’s just picking up on what Ryan was saying about that consistency and being on the same page, that the companies that we’ve seen do well and continue to invest are those that have acknowledged the need to invest in technology early on. They’ve set up innovation hubs and programs and appointed people centrally to be leaders of technology and innovation, and they’ve embedded it in the organization. So yeah, as Ryan says that, yeah, everyone’s on the same page and everyone’s pulling in the same direction.

 

Chris Cadet: 

Encouraging to hear. Ryan, any final thoughts from yourself?

 

Ryan Christie-J…:  

No. I think it’s been good to see the data validate what we’re seeing. So for me moving forward, I think very much it’s about working with our leaders on that top down approach.

 

Chris Cadet: 

Excellent. Well, I want to thank you both. It certainly has been interesting. It’s encouraging to see some of the analysis coming through around the increase in adoption of technology. I think some of the things that you’ve shared, Ryan, are really encouraging. I think there’s opportunities there, where change can happen both from a top-down approach.

So looking at it from a strategic sense and getting that buy-in. But then also looking at that bottom-up approach where some efficiencies can be gained by introducing technologies that don’t have a big impact but can really help with people that are on the ground out there delivering projects.

And also interesting to see some of the analysis around the shift in asset classes as we move more towards renewables. That’s certainly something we are seeing a lot of movement. There are a lot of projects in planning phase, so it’ll be interesting to see how these organizations really do gear up and get ready when they get to that delivery phase.

They know they’re heading that way. There’s a lot of coverage in the media about it. So it’ll be interesting to see where they sit in terms of their adoption of technology. And really how they fight for talents or what strategies they do put in place to secure the right people to help really deliver these projects.

So I do want to thank you both for your time and for sharing your insights. For the audience, I do encourage you to visit our website, www.ineight.com and have a look at information. And don’t forget the survey at the end of this webinar. We’d love to get some feedback from you. We do these for you, so please reach out to us. Thank you so much. Thanks gentlemen.

 

Ryan Christie-J…:

Thanks all. Thanks for tuning in.