It is unusual for contractors to be in the vanguard of technology adoption, but they clearly are in the case of mobile communications and have been for decades. "Construction people have to see a real return on investment before they adopt, but when they do, they adopt quickly," says Dick Farris, a co-founder of Primavera Systems Inc., Bala Cynwyd, Pa. "The construction people were among the first to use cell phones extensively. They’re always traveling, always needing to stay in contact." "Construction is a communications business," agrees Peter Lasensky, CEO of Pacific DataVision, San Diego. "It’s virtually all logistics. You
A large part of the human experience is trying to answer the interminable questions "Where are we?" and "Why?" Perhaps the highly intuitive nature of global positioning systems in pinpointing locations and managing assets is key to its widespread interest. GPS is a significant, yet small, component within the much-larger arena of Geographic Information Systems. GIS hardware and software captures, navigates, analyzes, manipulates and retrieves geospatial data. It can include GPS data, along with project management software, radio-frequency identification and portable mapping tools. Adoption of GIS often requires specialized training and technical support to keep reams of complex information up-to-date
CONSTRUCTION LINK Combining tools with purpose. Looking forward, industry deep-thinkers say the near term holds useful tools ready for work that need only be appreciated, adapted and applied. The future holds inventions yet to be defined. "When it comes to new technology that’s ready to take the construction and building industry by storm, it’s out there," says Ric Jackson, FIATECH managing director. He says technologies are just waiting to meet the criteria of solving problems, being easy to use and being affordable. "You’ve got to rank them not in terms of ‘this is cool,’ but in terms of ‘I have
In early 1995, it was big news when Winter Park Construction, Maitland, Fla., launched a home page on the World Wide Web. E-mail already proliferated in most big companies but was primarily for internal communication in many firms. Otherwise, they used America Online, CompuServe or Prodigy for their business e-mail until about 1996. The dial-up connections were so slow—9600 bits per second was fairly standard; 14.4 kilobits per second was a luxury—that downloading files, even small ones, was painful and frustrating. Many people just stuck to fax machines, overnight delivery or floppy disks to transfer data. Contrast that with today's
Examining company notes from the birth of Autodesk Inc., San Rafael, Calif., and its design software, AutoCAD, reminds us of the original dreams behind computer-assisted design. AutoCAD was created to bring CAD capabilities to the newly introduced desktop IBM PC and allow "serious computer-aided design" to be done on desktop machines, rather than very expensive, dedicated workstations. Literature prepared for the product introduction in 1982, as recorded on a voluminous Website of company records maintained by John Walker, company founder and co-author of AutoCAD, defines the goals for the product and the problems it set out to solve. Some are
More than 40 years ago, early breakthroughs in light transmission helped field surveyors lay out work sites with higher degrees of accuracy, precision and productivity than was previously possible. Today, the familiar bright-red dot and beam have become indispensable beacons for those needing to square up a joint, measure distances, find a grade, mark a slope and, more important, double-check progress as work is being completed, before it’s too late. Originally an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, lasers were first conceived by Albert Einstein, who theorized in 1916 that light could pass through a substance to
The migration of powerful computing technology from the labs to the desktops brought construction a stream of analysis software –spawned from spreadsheets and calculation programs capable of swiftly performing huge numbers of operations. Bringing ever-heavier computing power to engineers drives innovation. From the ability to create "what-if" scenarios about stress distributions within finite regions of assemblies, to dynamic 3-D simulations of progressive changes in large-scale environments, engineers can resolve increasingly complex questions, thanks to the computer’s ability to rapidly solve large sets of equations. But still, much of the analysis technology remains rooted in its past. RELATED LINKS 10 Electronic
The advent of personal computing tools in the early 1980s began to slowly awaken millions of business users to the advantages of working in digital data. Mainframes and server rooms as well as word processors came first, but for the longest time most of the construction world was still mired in paper and lots of it–slips of paper, backs of envelopes, half-finished lists, unreadable scribbles, heavy notebooks and files. The turn toward digital applications was accelerated by the introduction of personal computers, which helped ordinary people see the potential of technology to help them get organized and accurately automate mundane,
Next to the telephone, the fax machine is the lowest common denominator of electronic communications in business. If you have nothing else, chances are you have a fax, and that is enough to tuck documents right into the data stream. Bar-codes on cover sheets now can route transmissions as scanned records directly into document management systems. Facsimile transmission was patented in 1843 by Alexander Bain, a Scottish mechanic. He used a stylus on a pendulum to scan an image on a metal surface and transmit it by wires to a corresponding device that reproduced it. He was trying to solve
Design-build has gained a strong foothold as a U.S. construction delivery method over the past decade. But with the domestic market’s downturn in 2001, accelerated by the 9/11 terror attacks, design-build’s meteoric rise has leveled off. Revenue for the Top 100 Design-Build Firms dropped 12.2% overall in 2003, to $48.57 billion from $55.29 billion in 2002. Domestic design-build revenue fell even faster last year, 21.1%, to $32.51 billion from $41.23 billion in 2002. But a 14.2% hike in firms’ international revenue last year may offer solace. Some of this revenue fall-off may be attributed to the absence of some major
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