A deep dive into BAM’s approach to digital construction

In total, more than 250 people attended the roadshows, including this journalist.

Fannon explains the role of the roadshows: “They’re a new idea to showcase the breadth of our skills and competencies to allow attendees to understand the capability of our digital team.

“There are a number of reasons, not least that the [digital] complexity of projects has increased: the roadshows were a way of communicating the complexity and how we manage the contractual deliverables. They lifted the bonnet and showed what we do at each stage of a project.”

Increasing understanding and thereby adoption of digital processes and technology is essential for BAM’s digital team to deliver its vision and short-term targets. Among the latter are the compliant use of BAM’s internally developed CDE on all projects, compliant site data capture, compliant information management execution and 19650 compliance.

That challenge must be seen in the context of how BAM was restructured a few years ago. Fannon reminds CM: “The previous structure was regional digital teams. There were seven digital teams in [BAM] Construction, all doing different things. Our target operating model pulls all those teams into one large team. So, we’ve got about 95 people now, all with different skill sets, which allows us to deploy the best athlete to any job, which is a really powerful thing because we’ve now got strength in depth.”

That team is structured into three centres of excellence:

“We dial in the digital service, via the centres of excellence, to meet the project needs. It really works. It allows us to bring the best knowledge to a project,” Fannon explains.

Fannon reveals the digital capabilities BAM wants to invest in are managed through several digital portfolios:

He dives into more detail: “We have a digital building block framework that allows us to categorise all the digital capabilities that are deployed on projects, so we can start to analyse what worked well, what didn’t work well, and allow us to scale the technology.

“Reality capture is now a foundation technology in [BAM] Construction that uses visual intelligence to track progress. That allows us to offer to our clients full transparency. We can demonstrate that fire protection was installed on a particular day, for example. It offers us that deeper golden thread and full audit of the build process

“And we are piloting some AI progress tracking with Buildots. We have three projects right now, and we’re analysing internal processes to get the best from the technology and assessing the data capture and predictive functions of the AI. It takes out that optimism bias that we have in construction.

Many tier one contractors that have engaged with digital for more than a decade have begun to recognise that their tech stack is too large, featuring a number of software packages that are not used consistently across the business or, worse, barely used at all.

Fannon observes: “Like all main contractors in the past, we went out and bought every toy in the shop, and then realised that we didn’t need every toy. We can’t keep choosing the latest shiny tool, because change [from implementing that tool] is a challenge, and we know that. Within the proptech space, there’s rapid change: we can’t keep up with change, and if we keep swapping products, we’ll only frustrate our people.

“We want to systemise to scale, using less product, and partner with technology vendors to adopt their products to meet industry needs. We’ve done exactly that with Autodesk: we are working closely with them. They receive feedback from us about what the software can and what it can’t do. It’s in their roadmap to improve the full lifecycle approach across their platform ecosystem. We’re definitely doing more with less.

“The majority of our people are going to use maybe one or two or three pieces of technology: let’s be really useful and purposeful with those and drive as much value as possible.”

He emphasises: “We want all of our people throughout the whole of the UK and Ireland to do their job in the same way, on the same platform to improve the quality of data.”

Of course, the business remains open to innovations and new ideas, especially around AI, but here, Fannon reinforces his point: “The tech stack will be AI-enabled – just through the vendors applying AI to their products. BAM will then continue to mature its AI capability across our organisation.”