From digital twin initiatives to the evaluation of business models, the projects look to inform future practice and policy.
This is analogous with use of configurators and Platforms – designers can put more effort into the project specific and value-adding design and less into the documentation of the ‘chassis’.. Can we do this?What should our digital marketplace look like?.
Other sectors have grasped the opportunities and challenges faced by e-commerce in different ways and with different levels of success, but it’s now an unavoidable feature of daily life for most businesses and individuals.It is something that construction should – and can – also be heading towards.There is no question that a digital marketplace for Platforms is achievable; the policy context is in place and there is a growing body of work that would support this.
It’s up to the industry to decide what it looks like.We should shape this now, proactively, rather than wait for external forces or commercial imperatives to impose something on us..
Considering the examples above, here are the key aspects I believe a digital marketplace for construction Platforms should include:.
Create a direct link between customers and manufacturers, reducing transactional friction.Our Design to Value approach to master planning is an example of that.. Our Creative Technologies team has produced a number of digital configurators, including master planning tools for railways, roads and data centres.
These configurators rely on comprehensive data sets, organised in such a way as to be codified and machine-readable.The master planning approach described in this article can be seen as the data-gathering and organising part of digital master planning – the preparatory work which could lead, in this case, to a digital configurator for pharmaceutical facilities..
While the data we gather in master planning involves large amounts of human activity and processes, the outputs are all digital to some degree, and the entire process is digital in character, seeking to extract and organise data, so that at a later stage we can establish and apply rigorous rules.This is where Design to Value intersects with digital.. For master planning, this is an approach that is proven to deliver substantial benefit to clients, against a wide range of value drivers.