Element 8: Technology- & Knowledge-enabled Workforce

Tactical Plan

Working Team | Vision | Problem | Benefits and Opportunities | Barriers & Challenges | Goals | Strategy | Focus Areas & Projects | Timeline | Founding Team | 2007 Executive Summary

Scope

Focus on the people aspects of advancing and implementing technology within the capital projects industry.

Working Team

The team members listed here have contributed to the content of this document during its development. For a list of current working team members refer to the FIATECH web site.

Bechtel, Shrikant Dixit
CH2M HILL, Faith Junghans
Bechtel, Ron Surroc
Bentley Systems, Scott Lofgren
COMIT and Jackson Civil Engineering, Neill Pawsey (Team Champion)
Karmin McKay
Portland State University, Christopher Garlick (student member)
USACE, Johnnie Shockley

Vision

The Vision statement describes what is wanted in the future.

Skilled and committed workers, enabled by technology and empowered by "knowledge at their fingertips" will perform to new levels of productivity. Workers in all functions of the capital projects enterprise will be enabled by technology that assists them in doing their jobs more effectively. Traditional divisions of labor and skills will be redefined, from the top floor to the trenches, to broaden the capabilities and value of every worker in the emerging team-based project environment. Redefined  industry allegiances and incentives are required for a more stable and reliable labor supply for all of the industry. A "knowledge supply chain" will assure the ready and consistent supply of the right workers with the right skills.

Current Problem

The Current Problem statement describes the existing situation.

There is a shortage of workers (professional and craft) in the industry to meet demand. The shortage is getting more critical due to less numbers entering the construction workforce perceived as low pay and slow career growth.  The current and outdated industry tools and processes do not appeal to new generations, and productivity in industry has been lagging behind other industries. 

Construction has historically struggled with technology and automation implementation.  Implementation of new technology has been very slow, and absorption rates are low, compared with other industries. Traditional means of technology training and skills improvement have failed due to the nature of the workforce, which is transient both from an organizational affiliation as well as geographic perspective.  Traditional recruitment processes are not enough to draw people to engineering/construction career path – need to lure them in with a better understanding of our work (i.e. internships).   New generations are more socially responsible and creative – these need to be linked to our industry.  Issue is lack of high pay in our industry versus the lucrative other career opportunities (i.e. Wall Street) financial markets.

Potential Benefits & Opportunities

Emerging technologies will drive the evolution of new workforce paradigms that transform long-held division of roles. These technologies will empower different types of workers to make full use of captured knowledge, advanced information delivery mechanisms, and next-generation automated systems across the project and facility lifecycle. Tightly integrated workflows enabled by vastly improved project management systems, demand-based resourcing, and total visibility into the job site will significantly reduce the time and cost of construction. Much of the time compression will result from on-demand access to accurate information, and advanced training delivery and task guidance mechanisms. Improved coordination between workers at all levels will enable far more operations to be performed simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Improved tools, equipment, and materials will enable all workers to perform their tasks faster, easier, and with assured quality and safety. Wearable computers, heads-up displays, wireless communications, and smart tools and equipment will be integrated with site monitoring and control systems. The coordination of stepwise tasks with extremely high efficiency will guide each worker in the task at hand. These systems will assure that tasks are performed correctly, alerting workers to problems and providing on-demand guidance and training as well as assuring that they have the tools, materials, and other resources they need to do their jobs.

The benefits apply to all segments of the industry. Assurance of a properly trained and skilled labor supply will bolster confidence and stability. Improved skills and knowledge empowerment will improve productivity and employment security. Safety, health, and environmental compliance will be dramatically improved. Specific benefits for industry stakeholders are outlined in thee table below.

Potential Barriers & Challenges

The construction industry has a very transient workforce due to our “project culture” and pricing structure (low margins, competitiveness).  A project is a collection of people and tools, put together for a short time interval, to deliver a specific goal. The short-term nature of job assignments creates a classical chicken-and-egg problem, which retards technology implementation. There is low tolerance for process improvements and technology experimentation within a project lifecycle, due to high lead times for technology implementation, and perceived risk.  There is low funding/resources outside the project lifecycle, to drive meaningful change.  Also risk adverse…

Academia needs guidance from industry with regards to core competencies….

Upper management “old farts” who provides leadership to industry is stuck in old way of thinking, old way of conducting business – need some new blood and ideas. Stagnant workforce leads to stagnant business ways…highly bureaucratic work environments dissuade new folks from coming into industry.

Need to shorten technology lead time and adsorption rate…

Standardize “learning” – to make the learning beneficial across Job Hopping” or job mobility.

Goals

The Goal statement describes what is expected to be achieved.

The goal of the knowledge-enabled workforce is to define the steps needed to improve technology assimilation rate in the Construction industry, to transform the workforce to a highly productive environment, where rapidly evolving technology, tools and process can be quickly implemented.

This will include identifying specific skills required for the workforce, innovative application of non-traditional and on-the-job training tools to improve speed of technology deployment, and tools for knowledge and technology transfer between a transient workforce.

Faster rate of technology assimilation will create opportunities for construction projects to implement technological advances within the lifecycle of a project. A vibrant technology friendly construction industry will enable rapid improvements in productivity, and attract better talent, and provide challenging career options.

Strategy for Achieving the Goal

The strategy statement describes how we see the goal being achieved.

This transformation will be achieved over time through a combination of training, technology implementation, and evolution of business processes to incentivize productivity and efficiency. Lifelong learning and ready acceptance of new technology will be the norm across the industry. Workers at all levels will benefit from technologies that assist them in doing their jobs more effectively. The technological transition will drive a gradual transformation of the industry work culture. Committed workers who serve the total interests of the capital project enterprise will replace trades-based, transient workers.

Management of the workforce will shift from mandated practices to embedded practices. Health, safety, and environmental awareness will be engineered into methods, processes, systems, and equipment. Training and education will make proactive use of emerging technologies, providing, interactive multimedia instruction and monitoring to assure compliant practice.

The demand for the new generation of workers will be met by a knowledge supply network. The present system of supply and demand will be augmented by a proactive system that focuses on projected needs by region, company, or skill, and specifically prepares workers to fill those needs. Government, industry, labor unions, and other stakeholders will work together to assure the ready supply of workers with the right skills and cultural mindset.

Knowledge capture and application is an integral part of the vision. Knowledge management tools will help assure that lessons are truly learned and that well-defined, meaningful best practices are used in all applications. Knowledge-based advisors will assist workers in all segments of the industry in performing their jobs to the optimum.

Focus Areas & Projects

The focus area section describes what we are going to focus on, and specific projects are proposed within each focus area.

FA1: Skilled and Committed Workforce
Skilled and committed workers, enabled by technology and empowered by "knowledge at their fingertips" will perform to new levels of productivity. Workers in all functions of the capital projects enterprise will be enabled by technology that assists them in doing their jobs more effectively.

Education and training throughout the industry has never before been a necessity as it is today.   The explosion of information technology over the last several decades and continuation of rapid changes in technology drives the need to adapt and learn.  Workers at all levels will have access to a larger range of educational opportunities than every before. 

On-line, self paced learning, on-demand and just-in-time training will be the norm. Increasingly the need to define a more elaborate set of skill definitions will allow the worker to be more active in the learning experience, providing both self-assessed and tested competencies.  Worker will monitor there own progress, understand the skills required and be invigorated to learn new skills.

Traditional divisions of labor and skills will be redefined, from the top floor to the trenches, to broaden the capabilities and value of every worker in the emerging team-based project environment.  A "knowledge supply chain" will assure the ready and consistent supply of the right workers with the right skills.

Projects:

E8-FA1-P1 Core Technology Competencies
This project will develop a "core competency" guide for our industry to share with degree granting institutions (first), followed by other non-profits agencies, continuing education, and training centers to help in curricula development. Providing a roadmap of core competencies deemed essential by members of FIATECH will assist universities and trade schools in the preparation of their graduates, which will make new hires more productive earlier. Project deliverable: A comprehensive guide/plan which identifies the core competencies our members deem essential for graduates to be more productive and adapt more easily into their first year in the workforce.

E8-FA1-P2 – Industry K-12 Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM) Survey
There are a myriad of organizations aiming at targeting children from Kindergarten and through high school “K-12” to guide them into science and engineering education and future careers.  This survey will capture ongoing organizational activities to both serve as a resource for each other but also to share knowledge that each organization has collected as far as what works to draw workers to this industry. Project deliverable is a published article and white paper summarizing main attributes of targeted organizations.  Survey results will also be evaluated which programs directly flange up to our industry and will help draw new entrants to our industry.

E8-FA1-P2 Craft Training Workshop (Worker Evolution)
Conduct a workshop on craft training to gather industry feedback on how to prepare craft workers to operate productively within a full automated and integrated technology jobsite. We are all aware of the workforce crisis in the industry and this workshop is an opportunity to bring key players together to understand the issues and challenges on craft training.

E8-FA1-P4 Professional Development Technologies
Develop automated systems to deliver work information, training, certification requirements, and other advisory information that enable a highly skilled and productive workforce to accomplish build functions with automated processes, increased concurrency of job site activities, and in a significantly reduced timeframe.  Elements to be looked at include on-demand training, interactive work instructions, ruggedized information delivery systems, and worker certification and verification systems.

E8-FA1-P5 Worker Certification and Verification Systems

E8-FA1-P6 Incentives and Rewards Definition

FA2: Knowledge Management for Capital Projects Industry

Projects:

Workers at all phases of the capital projects industry will be able to tap into the collective knowledge existing in the AEC industry-- developing, adding to, and using what others in the industry have created.  Tools and processes will allow individuals and organizations to generate value from intellectual and knowledge-based assets from other parts of roadmap. 

The industry will reinforce the culture that promotes sharing and learning, ensures better information is more widely available, reduces duplication of efforts, develops and disseminates 'best practices', and allows for the passing of valuable information between industry stakeholders.   No longer will knowledge be locked into one project phase, with one stakeholder, or withheld from the owner/operators.   As knowledge is captured it becomes available to industry and project stakeholders, customers, and partners.

E8-FA2-P1 Knowledge-based Toolset Definition

E8-FA2-P2 Construction Knowledge Supply Network

E8-FA2-P3 Construction Knowledge Capture and Application Systems

E8-FA2-P4 Create a ‘FIA-pedia to create “knowledge at your fingertips”

FA3: Collaborative Business Process Management and Workflow

Application of the roadmap technical elements requires collaborative business process management and new workflow processes.  Understanding and changing the way capital projects are delivered to attain the benefits requires people to define information handover standards, address liability issues, and to clarify who does what ,when,  and why. Examples of these new workflows include:

• AE’s sharing their data-centric models
• Modeling required by subcontractors, trades, fabricators, subs-clash testing
• Onsite construction project meetings with the integrated 3D model

Capital projects are already sourcing supplies from around the world, and supplier and sub-contract management with global partners is a challenging task. The ability of a diverse work-force spread across the globe in different time-zones to work seamlessly in teams will be a critical success factor for most construction projects. Collaborative business process management will be the glue that helps sustain these teams.

Seamless communication and collaboration among an increasing distributed workforce and partner community through voice, video, messaging, electronic data.  Engineers in the home office will be able to instantly see and assess a situation a half world away and allow the technical expert to provide assistance at a moment’s request. 

Projects:

E8-FA3-P1 Collaboration for Workforce Transformation
E8-FA3-P2 Automated Design Workflow Process (Element 2)

Seven-year Timeline

A timeline is proposed for the projects within this tactical plan.

To be developed.

Assumptions:

1. Preparation for each project includes identifying funding, resourcing and project set-up.
2. 3-6 months is the typical time-frame for the actual work on each project
3. The "X" is placed in the year of the most intensive work, although there may be opportunities to start some phases earlier or to run some projects in parallel for a while.

Founding Team

Arizona State University, Dr. Christine Fiori and Dr. Allan Chasey
Bechtel, Ron Surrock (Team Co-Champion) and Shrikant Dixit
Bentley Systems, Scott Lofgren
CH2M HILL, Faith Junghans (Team Co-Champion)
COMIT, Neill Pawsey
Consolidated Contractors Company, Zuhair Haddad
DeVry University, Karmin McKay
Fluor, John McQuary
Hanyang University Ansan, Saumya Swain
Hatch, Bea Lozinski
Intergraph PPM, Shanthi Lindsey
Purdue University, Dr. Luh-Maan Chang
S&B Engineers and Constructors, Ron Christy
Texas A&M University, Jorge Vanegas
University of Calgary, Kasun Hewage
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Johnette Shockley and Van Woods

© 2007 FIATECH. All rights reserved