Building for Our New Virtual World

By Ken Smerz, CEO of ZELUS

Some are referring to 2020 as “The Lost Year”, but even with as much difficulty as it posed, the year is also becoming synonymous with rapid innovation and technological advancement and acceptance. In fact, it’s also earned a slightly more positive name: The Great Digital Acceleration.

Across all sectors, digital adoption accelerated at a pace unlike any other time in our history. Some industries packed three years of digital transformation into 12 months, where others accelerated their strategies by an average of six years. While much of this was out of an immediate necessity to accommodate customers and provide employees the tools to work remotely, it’s become clear that the transition to digital and virtual is here to stay.

How will that impact the construction industry going forward?

Shifting the way we experience the world

The construction industry has traditionally been one of the slowest to embrace technology. But last year, we were forced to think about how to enable our in-office teams to work remotely, reduce the number of people needed on job sites, and collaborate with all stakeholders involved in the project virtually. In a matter of months, tech adoption in construction hit a record high as teams turned to digital collaboration platforms and building information modeling (BIM) tools and processes to keep projects on track and teams safe.

Just as we were confronted with the opportunity to rethink the way we do things, so too was every other sector of business, and that, as a by-product, has brought another significant change to our industry: the type of construction projects that surfaced over the course of the previous 12 months.

With most employers and government agencies now virtual and customers accustomed to having the option of a digital experience, it has created a new and different supply and demand landscape in the construction industry. There’s now a surplus of empty hotels, offices, schools and big-box retail centers, while simultaneously the need for distribution centers, affordable housing and satellite medical facilities has spiked.

Even prior to the pandemic, there were a number of systemic changes underway, including a complete redesign of the retail experience and how we prefer to shop. e-commerce website traffic was already at a new high in January, averaging 16 billion global visits. After the pandemic hit, that number jumped to 22 billion in June. Similarly, it was estimated the U.S. government already owned approximately 45,000 underused or underutilized buildings, and now that number has increased as a result of the pandemic.

Now that we’ve been living with this pandemic for the better part of a year, it’s been long enough to be habit forming. What may have initially been temporary patches to solve immediate needs is now becoming permanent, and the construction industry will see an explosion of adaptive reuse projects over the coming years to accommodate the demand.

The remaking of an existing infrastructure

As e-commerce continues to explode, retailers like Target, Walmart and Amazon, to name a few, are setting up more distribution centers to house consumer goods. These brands, along with delivery services companies like UPS and FedEx, are also investing in hub and spoke network models with strategically placed hubs surrounded by local stations or satellites throughout the U.S. Rather than build new, they’re taking advantage of the excess inventory of empty big-box retail centers, movie theaters and other existing structures that offer large, open spaces.

The pandemic has simultaneously put more pressure on governments around the globe to solve for housing shortages, which has spurred many to look at how to use existing government-owned inventories as well as vacated hotels and office buildings for affordable housing and senior living facilities. In the U.S. alone, it’s estimated as many as 7.2 million new affordable housing units will be needed to meet the current demand.

As adaptive reuse projects become more prevalent, so too will the relevance and importance of BIM in the industry.

Adopting and adapting to technology

It’s no secret we haven’t been leaders in adopting innovation and advanced tech for a variety of reasons. But today, a number of drivers are making technology an undeniable part of our future to not only accommodate a new way of work, but also improve efficiencies and solve for some of the challenges in our industry.

Combined with the national trade labor shortage, the need to do things virtually is forcing us to look at our processes to identify what can be eliminated or done remotely. An example of this is offsite prefabrication, which gives us the ability to build components of a building partially offsite, deliver them to the site and click them into the existing structure or new structure. This radically improves the building efficiency, reduces risk exposure to those on the job site and can improve the quality of the built components because they’re being fabricated in a controlled environment versus on the job site.

There’s also been a trend toward owners getting more involved. To the point where many are requiring contractors to produce digital 3-dimensional models of their existing or new structures so they can understand how best to utilize their assets, plan for emergencies, or simply have a historical reference for the future.

Whether for adaptive reuse or building new, the process of using technology to improve efficiencies has only accelerated. Now that we’ve experienced the value technology brings to the equation, we can bet there’s no returning to the “old way” of doing things. The digitization of our industry is here to stay.

Ken Smerz is the CEO of ZELUS, a digital as-built service provider. The company delivers Virtual Design Construction (Building Information Modeling) services as well as 2d/3d digital documentation using the most advanced, latest technology.