Tech Sprint teams show off solutions to improve construction

Winner: Team Resource

Our winning team presented an intriguing technological solution to the problem of waste in concrete delivery, which they dubbed “the Uber for concrete”.

The problem: if Builder 1 orders a load of concrete but then doesn’t use it all, it has to pay a fee of £300 to return it to the supplier. Builder 2 also needs concrete, but it already knows it only needs a part load.

Team Resource’s app allows Builder 1 to sell on his unused concrete to Builder 2, saving both builders money while also ensuring the concrete supplier’s fleet movements are fully optimised, freeing up the truck that would have been delivering a part load to Builder 2 to supply another site.

Builder 2 could even order a shared load with another builder right from the start via the app, saving the hassle and risk of selling on material.

“Everybody wins,” Team Resource said to our panel of judges, including the environment, with fewer vehicle movements also meaning lower CO2 emissions.

The idea was also scalable, with proposals to use the model for other building materials once the concrete market was conquered.

“This presentation showed the biggest potential return for the lowest amount of risk”

Judges’ comment

“There are other solutions out there that do something similar with unused materials, but frankly they don’t work,” Team Resource said. “We’re proposing a QA-validated material delivery.”

Our judges were impressed, saying there was an “obvious demand” for an app such as this, and that it was the most rounded presentation they saw.

They did query whether the concrete market was big enough to achieve the scale that an Uber-like solution would need to succeed.

The team quoted figures, which said that in London 2m cu m of concrete are used every year, of which 5 per cent is waste. At a rough price of £80 per sq m, that adds up to £8m of wasted concrete – and Team Resource’s 5 per cent cut of this when selling it on would generate £1.6m.

The judges were concerned this was too small, but the fact that the business could potentially pivot to other materials should concrete not work would provide an extra incentive for investors.

“This presentation showed the biggest potential return for the lowest amount of risk,” one judge said.

“It was the best demonstration of a practical use of technology, and while the team would need to think carefully about scale, they did extrapolate their vision well.

“They had considered everything and presented a well-rounded pitch.”

Team members:

• Emmanuel Chatoux, Vinci Construction Grand Projets, working on Tideway
• Dominic Deasy, Interserve
• Ross Harvey, WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff
• James Ibbotson, Willmott Dixon
• Paul Jeffries, Ramboll
• Tom Lacy, Murphy Group
• Kayley Lockhead, NG Bailey
• William Needham, Mott MacDonald

One Team

The first group to present, neatly named One Team, said that they wanted to solve one of the biggest problems facing the UK at the moment, something which politicians and the construction industry continually discuss: the housing crisis.

One Team argued that housebuyers have been priced out of the market, while SME housebuilders have also suffered due to a rise in construction costs and difficulties in obtaining planning permission.

Their solution, Home ID, was an “end-to-end one-click-buy system for housing” – an ambitious vision that impressed our judges.

The app contained a user interface, which used artificial intelligence to automatically assess the buyer’s needs, before creating a profile and generating a model of your ideal house.

The user was then able to customise the design of the house to their needs.

Next, hitting the buy button would draw up construction contracts and a schedule of works, putting the builders directly in touch with the buyer and potentially helping eliminate design costs for the SME contractors.

Our judges loved One Team’s “grandness of thought” and saw it as a visionary idea that was ahead of its time, but noted that the market for housebuying is not quite ready for a solution as different as this.

They did feel that the cost model and business model could have been clearer, though, and that it was different from Uber’s model of simple, high-volume transactions, despite trying to ape the taxi start-up.

The pitch was a good one, though, and the working user interface and 3D visualisation of a potential finished house proved particularly striking.

Team members:

• Tristan Beales Ferguson, Bam Nuttall
• Amin Hassanpour Divshali, Bryden Wood
• Kevin Lloyd, Balfour Beatty
• Aris Nikolarakos, Mabey
• Tom Triffitt, Arcadis
• Alex Wenden, Rise
• Yueyang Zhao, Wentworth House Partnership

Team Diversity

Team Diversity’s presenter got a laugh from the judges straight away by opening his team’s pitch Dragon’s Den-style, saying: “We’re looking for £20m for 5 per cent of our business.”

This team’s aim was clear: to change the way the industry works by creating a software platform to provide all the data about a site that anyone could ever need, in one easy-to-find place.

“We, as a team, love people in construction,” they said. “The problem is that we’re innovating people out of our systems, so it’s hard to lure people into our industry when we’re killing off jobs.

“We want to empower the individual to make better decisions.”

The team wanted to introduce agile management into the on-site decision-making process, allowing an individual to act quickly and avoid the slow, hierarchical process that is often in place within construction.

“The problem is that we’re innovating people out of our systems, so it’s hard to lure people into our industry when we’re killing off jobs”

Team Diversity

“Existing technology provides us with all the data we need to do this,” Team Diversity said. “This is a platform to bring this information in, from any source at all – CCTV, smartphones, sensors. You could even use drones to do this as well.”

The drone idea was proposed as an easy win, with continued on the fly monitoring one option for gathering data.

It was dubbed Site 4.0 – a new way of running a site to increase efficiency and bring in lean thinking to project management. The platform was designed to “get information to the right people at the right time” said the team.

Our judges felt there was a “clear need” for more solutions like these, but that the pitch could have been clearer in who it was targeting as a buyer – was it clients or contractors, or both?

The team had considered the technological detail well, using existing technologies in combination to feed its new software platform, and the idea of joining disruptive technologies together in one idea was strongly welcomed.

The judges did challenge the team, though, asking them how they could make this solution an even bigger step-change in truly delivering a radical change to how the construction industry works.

Team members:

• Manual Dove, Rydon
• Francesca Falzon, Rise
• Fabrizio Magistrelli, The Clancy Group
• Edward Olivier, Bam Nuttall
• Michael Percival, Van Elle
• Dan Rossiter, BRE
• Louise Shaw, Arcadis
• Lee Walters, Galliford Try

Team Inception

The third team to present, Team Inception, had a lofty goal: to transform the health and safety record of the construction industry by creating a mixed-reality robotic construction method.

The team would begin by creating a new eco-system that builds on the advances brought about by building information modelling. It highlighted the fact that both virtual and augmented reality solutions are being used already in the industry, demonstrating the potential usefulness of the technology if it could be applied in a more targeted way.

Inception proposed a new virtual reality set-up, using a virtual construction site to work through planning issues and improve outcomes and buildability.

The crux of the solution was to have people building on a virtual site while robots mirroring their movements worked on site in the real world.

“We want to achieve human-robot synergy”, the team said – a highly ambitious target that sounded almost like something out of a science-fiction novel, but one that is perhaps closer than you’d think.

“The team had a good, clear roadmap that factored in technology and cultural issues”

Judges’ comment

The initial target applications would be in repetitive operations like building floors on high-rise buildings, or welding, where human expertise is vital but the cost of labour is relatively high.

The AI model would be some form of marionette, and the team speculated that, over time, the robots could even teach other robots in a form of machine-learning that could transform the industry.

Our judges loved the team’s vision, perhaps most of all among the four teams, and felt it was a truly transformative idea that was probably closer to being reality than many would think, but it was lacking in the detail of how a business operating model would work.

The pitch in particular was a very strong one – clear, concise and convincing.

“The team had a good, clear roadmap that factored in technology and cultural issues,” said our judges – even if some of the more precise detail on costs and set-up time wasn’t quite there.

Team members:

• Peter Austin, Kier
• Jack Dearlove, ISG
• Paul Falkingham, NG Bailey
• Andrew Gascoine, Mabey
• Kristin Jones, McNicholas
• Graeme Kyle, Rise
• Volodymyr Opanasiuk, Flint & Neill
• Michael Owens, John Sisk & Son
• Trevor To, Gensler