The Pandemic Has Accelerated Use Of Technology In The Construction Field

The coronavirus has forced the construction world to adapt and evolve by increasingly using technology to get projects done, those in the field say. 

Over the past seven months, the pandemic has accelerated the use of technology across worksites to preplan, communicate and make jobs run more efficiently as contractors attempt to complete projects. With less manpower due to social distancing requirements as well as slowdowns in the supply chain, technology is needed in a way it never has been before, developers, construction technology experts and construction company leaders said on a Bisnow webinar about construction and development Thursday. 

“You can’t just keep hiring as many people as you need,” Silverstein Properties Development Project Manager Jamison Divoll said. “So this just really fast-tracked [the use of technology]. … We went from, 'Let’s do a lot of research and find what technology will work best for our business' to 'OK, now, in 2021, how are we going to leverage technology to do what we need to do with the uncertainties of what construction is going to look like?'” 

With no foreseeable end to the construction labor crunch, not to mention social distancing requirements that prevent packing workers onto job sites, technology has become essential to how timely the project gets done, he said. 

“How are the contractors and the design team and ourselves going to use technology to improve efficiency on job sites where you can’t just add more people anymore?” Divoll said. “You need to be more thoughtful about how you have to work in place. I think that’s kind of what concerns me in the coming year and what I am most interested to learn more about.” 

Mike Powers, a sales manager for construction software company Autodesk, said his company is seeing a lot of that increased usage. Larger general contractors and developers are using the technology for increased communications, while smaller companies are using it to soften the blow of the delays prompted by the pandemic, he said. 

“[Smaller] GCs and contractors … maybe have full workloads and the backlog started to dry up, so they are cutting back on not just software but employees,” Powers said. “So we’re mitigating that and talking about you can leverage technology to pick up some of that in the future.” 

The increased use of technology has saved those in design money before getting on the project as well, Powers said. 

“If they’re able to see design changes upfront in the design process, they can change that, and instead of having a $10K change in the construction field, they’re having a $10 change by moving a pipe or something like that along the [design] process,” he said. 

Even in portions of the construction world that have always used technology to get work done, there has been increased reliance since March, Mace Group Senior Project Manager Amira Nazar said.

“Specifically in the pre-construction phase, architects and engineers, they’ve been using technology forever … but with COVID, it’s just increased so much more because it’s harder to get together and they’ve just been purely doing it online,” Nazar said. 

In addition to saving time, virtual viewings of construction materials required during the most stringent period of the lockdown ended up saving her company money, she said. 

“We had a virtual mock-up review, which was a full sample of glass façade that we were supposed to go see in Germany around May,” Nazar said. “Obviously, we could not go, so … somebody had a camera, went up on a scaffold [as] our eyes, and we just got on the computer to view it. It was pretty good, pretty effective.” 

There has also been a shift toward prefabricated construction materials in the industry since the pandemic began, Nazar said. One example of this is in the increased prefabrication of a type of elevator used on construction sites that is only made in Italy. 

The installation of the machinery would face a delay, so the team began to put more of the machinery — such as prewiring — that would be done directly on-site together in Italy before it got into the field. 

“Instead of needing more men on-site or women to do this work, we can now do a lot more work in the shop and kind of pre-prepare and send the kits a bit more ready, then kind of need less people on-site, and we’re able to still meet the schedule,” Nazar said. 

New York City’s construction force faces a hard road ahead. In addition to delays caused by shutdowns and social distancing compliance, construction employment fell 35% year-over-year in May, and it is expected that at least 2% to 3% of those laid-off workers won't return to the construction workforce.