The creation of new technologies has caused remarkable changes in the way businesses and companies work nowadays;
In this article, you will find the way in which the enabling technologies that allow the design, construction, operation and maintainance of smart buildings have influenced the construction industry.
In this way, what jobs were created and which ones were eliminated? Where are they located?
In order to understand this evolution process we will explain the value chain of the construction industry and how it has been re-shaped.
“The value chain describes the full range of activities that firms and workers do to bring a product from its conception to its end use and beyond”.
Value chain changes during the penetration of new disruptive technology.
Starting from the inbound logistic and procurement a construction firm needs not only to manage the logistic of traditional material but also of technological ones such as new devices involved in IoT and machine learning. Under a human resource management firms need to care about the training of personnel about technology unknown and far from what they were used to.
Another problem in the first step of new value chain is related to timeliness of procurement. If before the frequency of purchasing was low and firms could store material according to their needs (concrete is always going to be concrete!), now the continuous technological change and the dynamism of IoT industry forces them to acquire most frequently the components related to smart building to catch up with upcomings in this field.
In the crucial step of Operation new categories of issues are now at stake: the introduction of digital devices is considered from the initial design phase at the same time of technical subsystem. The firm need to have some specific profile within its design team able to face the integration of software and devices in the traditional design of a building.
Quality assessment is now a bigger deal than before! Again a new technical profile is needed to assess whether the functionalities installed in the construction site follow the existing, and always changing, protocols (way far from the competencies usually required!) and are actually functioning.
Even though the outbound logistic is not heavily influenced by the transition to smart building, marketing and sales is changing dramatically. Be careful! Given that the target market is changing toward people more and more interested in “smart” characteristics of the building rather than on the traditional ones, a new market segmentation is needed to deliver the value more accurately. Marketing will get more customized and relationship with buyers more personal. Another challenge for you is to train the salesforce accordingly with the new and different advantages of their product; remember also to recruit better qualified sales personnel to achieve better performances in service positioning and image!!
Finally, post-sale services almost absent in the traditional business model will see and increase due to the nature itself of smart buildings. In this field things will change dramatically mostly because of the adoption of machine learning technology, as pointed out in our previous post the practice of predictive maintenance has an huge impact.