Ingenious apps are exploding on the marketplace daily, but they have little worth if the people they’re designed for have no interest in using them. Keiko Miyazaki, SF ’14, head of global strategy and marketing for PanaHome Asia Pacific, Panasonic’s real estate arm, says the construction industry is a case in point.
Not everyone is comfortable living and working in digital environments, Miyazaki points out, and professionals in the construction industry, as a group, tend to be more resistant than most. Based in forward-focused Singapore, PanaHome is expanding across Asia into Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam, where builders and contractors are more deeply entrenched in traditional methods.
Miyazaki entered the building industry two years ago motivated to help advance it into its digital future, one of Panasonic’s key goals. She says the industry naturally lends itself to digital tools and that those tools have the power to increase creativity, efficiency, productivity, and sustainability. She gives as an example apps that aim to produce a sort of virtual construction site, digitizing all aspects of a building project in one central cloud-based database, making it easy to monitor individual—as well as intersecting—aspects of a project as it progresses.
The resistance to digital tools
But Miyazaki says that building professionals often prefer to stick to pencil and paper and “leave cloud environments to airline pilots.” She says that it comes down to a why-fix-what-isn’t-broken mindset. “Builders have been building buildings in the same basic ways with pretty much the same tools for generations. They are more interested in utilizing building tools or materials to directly meet construction goals or reduce costs than they are seeking to apply technologies to improve the process or enhance creativity.”
Another barrier to a digital construction site is the diversity of professionals who contribute to a building project—electricians, plumbers, masons, woodworkers, window, HVAC, and insulation installers. Each of those subject experts works in a self-contained realm, to some extent, speaking the distinctive lingo and undertaking the specific processes of that trade. Dovetailing all these different procedures and priorities into one overarching digital construction site that is easy to use for professionals from all industries remains a challenge.
“I know we can make houses better—not just cheaper or fancier,” Miyazaki says. “We have the resources to create more responsible buildings, buildings that are better for the environment, that provide greater quality of life, and that last for 50 years. The technology is out there. I believe that digital tools will revolutionize the construction industry…but maybe not just yet.”
Read more about innovations in digital business across the global marketplace.
The post Building better buildings with digital tools appeared first on Leadership Blog.