The Digital Construction Awards attracted 170-plus entries this year, 85 of which have been shortlisted. Here, we detail the finalists for the Digital Contractor of the Year award.
This category recognises the contractor – main contractor or specialist – that has demonstrated excellence and transformed their business through the adoption of digital methodologies and technologies. Four contractors made the shortlist.
Alconex Infrastructure and Solutions
Alconex, a fully accredited independent connection provider covering all areas of the UK, is successfully challenging the multi-utilities industry through an app developed in-house, UtiliMate.
Launched on Android and iOS platforms in January this year, UtiliMate connects Alconex’s workforce to plan, execute, monitor and report on projects in minutes rather than hours.
Offering unique functionality for multi-utility services, the bespoke app has transformed traditional business practices and created a paperless workforce, streamlining site documentation, tracking progress and improving client communication in real-time through smartphones.
UtiliMate is creating a more environmentally-friendly multi-utilities delivery model by lowering Alconex’s carbon footprint and positively impacting emerging markets such as solar farms and EV charging stations.
Informed by industry challenges and identifying commercial opportunities to retain clients, as well as creating a point of difference across the sector, UtiliMate is digitising multi-utility contractors by delivering time and money savings to the business and its clients in four ways:
- Increasing internal efficiencies by creating a paperless workforce with digitised paperwork for risk assessments, method statements and environmental reports.
- Improving revenue and cashflow by delivering rapid and reliable information directly to the workforce’s smartphones in real time.
- Creating transparent working practices, establishing ‘client comfort’ with allocated access to review project progress in real-time, including photographs, and removing the need for lengthy site visits.
- Securing mandatory health and safety procedures, enabling rapid reporting of onsite issues and non-compliance, in two clicks.
The benefits of UtiliMate so far include a 433% ROI from improved business efficiency created by fast work-in-progress communication between site and commercial teams, and saving between 20 and 30 hours every week with centralised document management.
BAM UK & Ireland
In 2023, Royal BAM Group began consolidating its £5bn global business into just two divisions. This included merging BAM Nuttall, BAM Construction and BAM Ireland into a new single entity under the name BAM UK & Ireland.
The merger resulted in important differences around digital maturity and inconsistent ISO 19650 information management practices across more than 5,000 project staff in the UK and Ireland. Projects ranged from those with dedicated digital resources to others relying on limited central support, and application usage varied greatly.
In response, BAM established a 14-strong digital project solutions department (DPS). This team, guided by a charter and leveraging hybrid working, focused on mobilising and deploying digital applications and processes.
Essential solutions included deploying an internal risk management application, a new internal information management tool and migrating more than 75 projects from Autodesk BIM 360 to Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC).
The team developed a simple, scalable process based on ISO-19650, including a BAM-developed application called ‘Source’ that provisions and links SharePoint sites and ACC projects, enforces ISO naming conventions and manages file transfers. Training was provided to support project teams.
DPS also created digital competence centres and introduced digital building blocks to embed best practices.
In 2024, the DPS team created 210 new Source sites and trained more than 700 internal and external users in Source and ACC. This approach led to BAM UK & Ireland’s ACC Build usage ratio of 1:1.19, almost twice the global adoption rate (1:0.62) reported by Autodesk.
This increased adoption allowed construction teams to maximise the use of ACC Build for site data capture, maximising BAM’s return on investment with Autodesk. The initiative demonstrated growing digital maturity and allowed subject matter experts to improve practices cascaded through the business.
McLaren Construction
In 2022, McLaren launched a five-year digital strategy, approved by the board, to establish itself as a tier one contractor with the technical capabilities, systems and supporting processes to manage the largest and most complex projects.
To implement this plan, the contractor created a 22-strong digital information management in-house team consisting of information management, digital construction and specialist system implementation managers.
The digital information management team is responsible for McLaren’s digital information management standard, ensuring compliance with building safety legislation and demonstrating robust digital information management for all aspects of design, procurement, change control, quality control and handover.
Three years after its creation, the team has succeeded in delivering user-friendly systems and driving culture change across the group, elevating the status of information management and data across McLaren.
Take-up has reached 90% of the contractor’s projects and 84% of its employees. More than 1,800 external users, including clients, designers and subcontractors, can now engage with McLaren’s digital systems and use its data.
The digital information management team has successfully integrated and deployed four core digital tools within the business, namely Dalux, Asite, OpenSpace and Microsoft Teams, alongside other important software platforms such as the McLaren Competency Hub and BIMCollab.
Other benefits of the integrated digital information management function include linking real-time procurement to live onsite KPI performance, managing exposure to main suppliers and ensuring live project performance is captured during appointment decisions.
The rationalisation of the software stack is saving McLaren £400,000 a year in duplicated digital tools. Additionally, the success of the team contributed to the contractor’s 2023/24 pretax profit almost doubling from £6.3m to £11.9m, as well as customer satisfaction demonstrated by a 74% rate in repeat business.
MWH Treatment
MWH Treatment is a design and build contractor focused exclusively on the UK water sector. It operates across nine water frameworks and has more than 1,500 staff and 2,500 external partners to deliver complex projects ranging in value between £200,000 and £200m.
MWH faced challenges affecting its clients and its business, including resource scarcity, environmental concerns, ensuring efficient collaboration across the workforce, meeting Ofwat’s regulatory deadlines, tackling insufficient digital expertise, resolving data complexity and inconsistency issues.
To deal with these complex issues, MWH adopted a digital delivery approach. The core principles of this strategy involved enacting digital technology throughout a project’s lifecycle, visualising information and establishing a clear digital charter.
The solutions included using digital tools for asset capture (such as surveying and scanning), 3D modelling, 4D digital rehearsal for planning and visualisation and field management solutions for precise data capture.
Safety was prioritised using ActiveSHEQ and Intuety, while gaming technology and virtual reality (VR) simplified communications and reviews. Power BI was deployed for resource optimisation, and technologies like Pix4D improved data quality from ground-penetrating radar, laser scanning and drone capture.
Benefits of MWH’s digital transformation include delivering 210 digitally-enabled projects ahead of regulatory dates in 2024. It has also achieved a sector-leading accident frequency rate of 0.018 over 5,500,000 person-hours and has won its 14th consecutive RoSPA President’s Award.
Additionally, DfMA solutions reduced site time by 30% and VR accelerated handover, saving approximately 315 weeks and £3m. MWH also delivered £2.3m of social value supported by digital tools.
Celebrate with the best
The winners will be revealed at the gala dinner on 1 July at the Brewery in London.
You can join the shortlisted entrants by booking your seats at the awards. There is an early bird discount for those who book tables before 16 May.
The Digital Construction Awards are organised by Digital Construction Week, Construction Management and the Chartered Institute of Building. The first sponsor to be announced is Bluebeam.
To find out more about the Awards, visit digitalconstructionawards.co.uk.
Generative artificial intelligence was used to help with the creation of this article. All content in the article was sourced, checked and verified by our editorial team before publication.
