Laing O’Rourke

Andrew T Harris

The emergence of new construction technologies is revolutionising the way projects are managed, making it an exciting time to be in our sector. Our team at Laing O’Rourke are optimistic about the powerful potential of emerging technologies to challenge traditional thinking and solve current complex problems in the built environment.

At Laing O’Rourke, we pride ourselves on our longstanding commitment to innovation. One of the ways we accelerate change is through our internal technology and innovation group. Led by myself and supported by other leading industry experts, we work within the construction technology ecosystem to address current and future challenges driving better outcomes for our clients and the community

Delivering certainty through engineering tools

As more major projects enter the market, the need for collaboration to drive stakeholder certainty has never been more important. We see digital engineering as critical to the future of our sector. Digital engineering is more than a digital model of a project, but rather a living, evolving ecosystem that adapts over the lifetime of a project. We use it as a comprehensive central source of truth, as a building block to unlock innovation and creativity through challenging current ways of working.

This technology can be used to virtually ‘construct’ complex builds several times over to develop safe and efficient methods and sequencing. This shared and collaborative environment mitigates risk of clash for quality control, delivering certainty to our clients

"As more major projects enter the market, the need for collaboration to drive stakeholder certainty has never been more important."

We are exploring solutions for deviation analysis through leveraging industry-leading algorithms, digital engineering and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology. The ability to rapidly identify of out-of-tolerance works provides us with the certainty required to propose and implement new solutions.

Enhanced collaboration through digitised interactive experiences

As a client-focussed business we want to use new technologies to drive greater collaboration with our clients while enhancing workplace productivity. More recent advances in 360-degree cameras have allowed us to develop virtual site walkthroughs and a dedicated cloudbased viewing platform, allowing our teams and clients to review site works and collaborate to find the best solutions from home. We believe that enhanced productivity is just one impact of this technology. It also continues to support our broader agenda to provide greater flexibility in the working lives of our people.

Managing our impact through smart monitoring

As we see a greater shift towards more brownfield development, the impact on communities and the environment must be more closely monitored and responded to. Advances in intelligent cloud-computing, data reporting and device miniaturisation are assisting with this. 

Laing O’Rourke, in recognising our responsibility to monitor and manage our environmental impacts, has recently partnered with leading environmental monitoring start-up, Site Hive. Deploying monitoring systems across our sites have equipped us with real time information about localised noise, air pollution and vibration. This information enables our us to move from inefficient compliance reporting to real-time management.

Robotics for safety, wellbeing and productivity

Robotics has already revolutionised industries like manufacturing and mining, creating efficiencies and augmenting the existing worker to make their experience at work faster, easier and safer. In the UK, Laing O’Rourke is working with project teams, trialling ‘cobot’ technology to improve worker safety, wellbeing and productivity through a UK-based research and development initiative. The cobots assist in laying rebar reinforcements, achieving a 30% improvement in rebar laying activities, at the same time drastically improving ergonomic experience for our workers.

In our Australian Hub, we have also seen the potential for robotics and machine learning technology to enhance safety on our worksites. Our industry-leading vision detection and machine learning system, the ToolBox Spotter has been designed to eliminate people, plant, and infrastructure accidents, though ‘seeing’ objects, and communicate potential risks in real-time. ToolBox Spotter has been spun-out to portfolio company, Presien to continue to support the safety of our people. We are excited about the potential of this technology to enhance the safety performance of our industry that has a historically higher rate of injury.

Delivering value through data analytics

Laing O’Rourke is increasingly looking at ways to interpret the huge undercurrent of data we capture, unlock key insights and use them to drive better decision making as a business for our clients, people and the community.

We see huge potential to use our data to make better decisions and are adopting this forensic approach across our projects. In our Europe hub we have partnered with a UKbased start-up that use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to improve our planning and schedule certainty. We see very real potential for this type of approach to create more realistic plans to our clients, thereby increasing confidence in our capacity to deliver of time and on budget, something our industry does not have a strong reputation for.

We are excited about the potential for new technologies to help us overcome some of the significant challenges facing our sector and our broader community. Our experience investing in new technology, coupled with our focus on the development of our people mean we are well placed to deliver projects with the certainty our clients deserve.