Why we need to Be INGENIOUS

The Construction Industry is at the same time the most collaborative yet the most fragmented industry in the world. Think about that juxtaposition for a second. What other industry brings together team members from more than 40 different companies in a unified effort to help plan, design, build, and operate complex physical projects? Construction plays a significant role in our everyday lives, with an 11 trillion dollar impact per year globally. Whether we are working directly on these projects or just trying to commute on the roads/bridges/rail that take us to the buildings we work in, we all live in the built world. Yet anyone familiar with the building process knows and feels how disjointed it is at every step of a project’s lifecycle.??

For decades we have been managing the chaos, first through paper and pen and now through emails back and forth to cover what has become a litigious industry where we are all trying to protect ourselves from being sued. The entrance of the cloud and mobile technologies in the last decade has somewhat aided in the effort to increase productivity; however, the mentality of finger-pointing and blaming others for delayed schedules and cost overruns still strongly exists on these projects. The cloud has, in many cases, helped document this process with more forms & documents uploaded to cover each party’s legal basis. Companies try to figure out a way to de-risk their position on the project so they can live to fight another day.? They ensure they have the information when that rainy day comes, and that leak is not their fault. None of this data is contextualized; none of this data is automated to provide them with predictive insights to prevent problems before they become multimillion-dollar mistakes.?

The current selection of Project Management solutions on the market is not helping this effort.?Significant gaps still exist between the jumps among the various groups of stakeholders in this project lifecycle process: lender/bank, owner/developer, architect/engineer, general contractor, and the different trade contractors. Project Management solutions exist for each of these personas but do not effectively cater to any of them. Worst of all, no cloud-based project management solution today solves for data and insights being shared seamlessly across all stakeholders. What you end up with is just managing risk through the upload and download of excel files and Word and PDF documents: all of this data is siloed. Not to mention there is a significant manual effort to enter all of that data into these various PM platforms on the market. Time that could be better spent to plan and be creative on how to bring the project in under budget and on time with the utmost quality.??

So why is this data so siloed? It is because they operate in what is a singular workspace. The owner’s instance of [insert PM software] does not talk to the GC’s instance of [insert PM software]. This means that each system operates autonomously and information needs to be double and often triple entered in order for information to be captured, causing an incredible administrative burden.?

I studied Industrial Engineering in my undergraduate studies and then Civil Engineering in my master’s program, both at Stanford University. I have now spent the last 18 years trying to apply lean principles to make construction projects operate as efficiently as manufacturing assembly lines. Even though you can have the right processes and people with the right mindset, until you have the proper tools to support them, I have found that you will continue to come up short.?

Enter INGENIOUS.BUILD. This is what the industry has been waiting for to reframe the problem in a unique way that will allow the construction industry to head back in the right direction to solving the fragmentation problem that technology has frequently made worse.?

INGENIOUS does this through the idea of connected workspaces. Workspaces that allow for data to flow seamlessly from the owner to the contractor to the trades and everyone in between. No more need for the administrative burden of data entry. For instance, the complexity of bridging project cost codes between different organizations is solved with a button click. Not only does this information now exist across all stakeholders, but you can start to harvest this data for insights and actual power over antiquated supply chain systems. The more companies that use the platform, the more valuable it becomes for each user, creating a viral effect of speed and intelligence for all stakeholders downstream.

The construction industry needs to Be INGENIOUS at this moment in time. We cannot afford to continue down this fragmentation, risk, and inefficiency path. Our customers need a technology platform that can truly enable them to be competitive, grow, and win. A platform that is simple, intuitive, and easy to use so they can spend more time building/innovating and less time figuring out how to finalize a budget, create a task/RFI, or send a change order.?

So why did I join INGENIOUS.BUILD? Because our platform is unique and provides an extreme competitive advantage compared to anything else available in the market through our connected workspaces. Workspaces are the future of all industries, and INGENIOUS is the ONLY company deploying this idea in the real estate and construction industry. More importantly, I firmly believe that INGENIOUS will have more of an impact on the built and physical world than any other software technology on the market in a few years. We will have impacted one of the largest industries in the world in one of the most positive and efficient gaining ways than any other construction software in history. Reach out to me personally ([email protected]) if you would like to massively improve the built world so that we can leave this earth knowing that we left it better than we found it. Your children and your children’s children will be thankful knowing that you decided to #BeINGENIOUS.