Firms across Australia’s design and construction sector must work to improve their digital maturity to make their operations and businesses more resilient in the face of ongoing challenges, according to a technology leader says.

During a recent interview with Sourceable, Fergus Dunn, regional executive at Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, told Sourceable that the importance of digital maturity should not be underestimated.

Dunn says that firms with greater digital capability have delivered better results during recent years as the industry has faced challenges associated with the pandemic, weather, and resource/material availability constraints.

Such firms have also been more adept at meeting requirements on larger and more complex projects.

“What we have seen is that firms that have grown their scope and profits during the pandemic are those who go early in their digital transformation,” Dunn said.

“(By contrast,) [o]rganisations, particularly in the construction sector, who are slow to digitize are being left behind and are not always able to adapt to those technical and functional requirements (of an increasing number of infrastructure projects of growing size and complexity).

“Projects of that size require a greater level of digitisation in order (for project teams) to be effective.”

Dunn’s comments come as Australia’s engineering and construction sector is working through a massive pipeline of large and complex infrastructure projects.

In its latest forecast issued in November, Australian Construction Industry Forum said it expects the dollar value of work done on railway construction work to peak at $16.3 billion in 2025/26 (2019/20 constant prices) – more than double its level of just $7.3 billon as recently as 2016/17.

Meanwhile, as work ramps up on the nation’s energy transition, ACIF expects activity on electricity and pipeline infrastructure to surge from $13.4 billion in 2020/21 to $18.3 billion by 2025/26.

This is happening as infrastructure investment is ramping up overseas. In the United States, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will see USD 550 billion invested over five years through to 2026 on infrastructure across roads, railways, bridges, water, resilience, and broadband.

At the same time, projects are becoming larger and more complex.

In 2020, a Grattan Institute report found that the average dollar value of major road and rail projects in Australia had more than doubled from $430 million to $1.1 billion over a five-year period.

All of which is creating project challenges in terms of competition for resources.

Based on its most recent estimate, Infrastructure Australia says that Australia most likely has a shortfall of 79,500 infrastructure workers as of this month and is likely to have an overall shortage of infrastructure workers until at least the latter part of 2024.

Within this, there might be particular shortages in specific roles as highly complex projects demand workers with engineering and technical skills that are highly specialised in some areas.

According to Dunn, this is driving a need for greater digital maturity for several reasons, which include,

• The need to manage and control scarce resources.
• Growing challenges in managing technical and functional specifications and requirements on larger and more complex projects; and
• Greater emphasis on digitisation from project owners, who are incorporating digital requirements into tender documentation.

Dunn says there are several misconceptions among AEC firms when it comes to digital transformation. These include perceptions that digital transformation is prohibitively expensive, and only for the “big end of town” and primarily an IT concern rather than an AEC operational concern.

Instead, he says the convergence of IT and engineering technology means that digitisation is becoming increasingly integral to design and construction operations.

Meanwhile, the level of capital expenditure required is not as extensive as often thought, and digital technology is an enabler to help firms of all sizes deliver effectively on major work.

Even for smaller firms, Dunn says, digital technology can and should be part of their planning. Indeed, he says projects nominated for Bentley’s Going Digital in Infrastructure Awards recently have shown that firms of various sizes are leveraging digital transformation to yield significant benefit.

Further, Dunn says improving digital maturity is often less difficult compared with how it is often perceived.

As an example, he points to approaches that will provide organisations with a foundation from which to create digital twins for infrastructure.

To enable them to do this, he says organisations should consider combining or federating their data from technologies in three areas into useable forms.

Once this is done, firms will have the building blocks upon which digital twins can be developed.

The three areas are:

• Digital context – technologies that enable project teams to capture real information about actual conditions on the ground obtained through surveys and processing this through reality modelling software or geographic information system (GIS) systems.
• Digital components such as models or 3D models that are created using commonly available engineering tools and are generated through design and engineering work on most projects.
• Digital chronology that comes through standard information platforms provided by Microsoft and others.

Speaking of his own firm, Dunn says Bentley offers several applications that can form the building blocks for future digital twins.

This includes information and data management software such as ProjectWise for managing engineering information and AssetWise for managing assets and operations. It also includes a reality toolset that includes ContextCapture, Orbit, and Cloud Services for managing data captured from drones or terrestrial standard survey and combining that into a powerful data model.

He encourages AEC firms to look at relatively simple steps to evolve their digital maturity.

“If you dispel some of the myths around it being expensive, complex and primarily for IT companies, the starting point is not as difficult as most people see,” Dunn said.

“There is a level of digitisation in most organisations. It is their maturity level and approach might need to be looked at.”