In order to match the challenge of creating high performance buildings, the construction industry needs to move toward high performance construction, says McGraw Hill Construction senior director Stephen Jones. During his remarks to open ENR’s Futuretech conference March 18-19 in San Francisco, Jones said the industry should foster “the industrialization of construction to reduce risk and uncertainty and get better designs out there.”Lean construction practices are paramount to a high performance construction strategy, but awareness and adoption of lean techniques is lagging. According to a McGraw Hill Construction study conducted in 2013, 30% of firms surveyed had not heard of
Photo Courtesy WaterFX Pilot project plant in California's Central Valley is about to be scaled up to a commercial-grade system, with little added load on the electric grid. Related Links: WaterFX Profile of Panoche Water District from the Pacific Institute After a little more than eight months of operation, a pilot plant that uses solar energy to distill contaminated groundwater in the parched farmlands of California's Central Valley has performed so well that at least one expert is seeing a new gold rush on the way."We are actually sitting on a wealth of groundwater that just needs treatment," says Dennis
Photo courtesy of Manhard Consulting Donald Willemarck, director of technology at Manhard Consulting, is looking forward to cutting the servers he maintains in his main office as a Nasuni customer. Related Links: Cloud-Integrated Storage Adds In-House Encryption BIM-in-The-Cloud Has New Competition With Newforma New distributed workforce collaboration systems rising in the AEC market are making an end run around crippling latency and bandwidth issues suffered by users sharing work on huge building-information-modeling file sets. They are doing it with hybrid systems of local and cloud servers, along with synchronization schemes that give everyone the speed of working locally, even among
Two years ago, I reported that the construction industry was dead last in IT spend as a percent of revenue compared to 14 other industries as reported by Gartner Research.Now, Gartner has broadened the construction industry category to include materials and natural resources, but the results are the same.In 2013, IT spend was 1% as a percent of revenue, 1.2% as a percent of operating expenses, and last on both measures compared to the 19 other industries surveyed. Gartner also put Construction in one of 12 industries where revenue is growing faster than IT spend, implying that it is unlikely
Related Links: Fiatech's Three Year Strategic Plan Cyber Security Executive Order Fiatech, an industry group made up of stakeholders who want to transform the world's infrastructure through technology innovation, has adopted a three-year strategic plan to ensure its research is well-targeted and valuable to members.The plan follows a 16-month study by a strategic-direction member committee composed of 24 industry-leading owners, manufacturers, AEC firms and academic institutions from around the world. Retired Dow Chemical Co. executive Jerry Gipson led the endeavor.Fiatech has been engaged in a systematic process of identifying issues and setting goals and strategies for implementing technology innovation since
Enormous amounts of data about projects in development can be analyzed through a browser-based search customized for the user's role in the industry, geographic area of interest and project type. Related Links: Dodge Global Network Dodge International McGraw Hill Construction's Dodge Global Network, a suite of information resources built on a database of current project leads and detailed project information, is completing transition of its subscribers to a new technology platform. The user interface coincides with the release of several new features. Early feedback indicates the system is now more useful and user-friendly.The transformation is due to a shift from
Related Links: Ventev Outdoor Power Solutions Water Enviornment Award of Merit SCADA For years, large supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems have suffered from an annoyingly simple vulnerability: backup batteries in radio-signal extenders can die, causing a loss of communication. One large utility says a new monitoring device from Ventev Wireless Infrastructure solves the issue.The SCADA for Southern Co.'s electrical grid is a series of devices that sends signals to each other via radio, says Bob Cheney, team leader for the power-delivery test lab at the utility, based in Atlanta. If two of these devices, called "preferred sources," are
image courtesy of D-Link Little monster The DIR-510L router has an Ethernet port and two USB ports to charge devices and transfer data. Related Links: Wiki entry on 802.11ac D-link's 510L wireless router and charger Terms such as "256 QAM," "MU-MIMO" and "beamforming" might sound like jargon out of a "Star Trek" episode, but they are new tech capabilities to boost wireless router speeds. They are hitting the market in the wake of the new WiFi standard called 802.11ac by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association and the emergence, in January, of the first Wave 2 devices
Related Links: Intel's Smart Bowl Announcement The Magnetyze System Juicebar SunBar As construction users increasingly take up mobile devices, battery drain is becoming a drag. Fortunately, innovators are on it. Here are a few neat items that impress ENR as being particularly promising or useful right now, including one from Intel unveiled at the Consumer Electronic Show in January.Click to begin the slide show.
RSS
