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It's time to stop kissing rattlesnakes, and start clicking those mice!
A dog food company hired the best management team money could buy. It spared no expense in product development, market research and advertising. Everyone agreed the company had the best handle on the marketplace, but sales continued to lag. Its executives gathered one da to deal with this issue and sat through hours of PowerPoint re- s sentations explaining market and industry trends. still, nobody could quite explain to the CEO's satisfaction why sales were far below projections.
Then, a tiny voice peeped from the rear of the room. "Dogs don't like it:'
That classic business joke is apropos to the construction industry's posture toward the Internet, which seems to have everything the construction industry needs.
Construction is a business involving an enormous amount of data, drawings and paperwork generated by people working for many different employers, often spread out geographically. RFPs, RFIs, RFQs, bids, plans and specs, memos and minutes, submittals, change orders, purchase orders, permits, engineering reports, inspection reports, punch lists, etc., etc., etc., must be communicated to disparate project participants in a timely manner.
Miscommunication leads to mistakes, and even small mistakes can have big consequences in construction. Communicating via the Internet is an effective way to reduce those mistakes. Information can be transmitted rapidly and simultaneously to all interested parties, with access restricted to only interested parties, and receipt automatically verified. Web-hosting resolves the problem of software incompatibility among project players, and with hand-held devices coming to the fore, project information can be updated in real time. Yoav Etiel, senior vice president of marketing for the construction software and online firm Bentley Systems Inc., came up with a figure of $400 billion in savings that could be realized if the construction world could adapt Internet technology efficiently.
Etiel spoke at AEC Systems 2000, an annual conference and trade show devoted to computerization in the construction industry. This year's version was held in Washington the first week of June, dubbed "From Bricks to Clicks: eSolutions for the AEC Industry." It was built around dot-com firms that host various construction services over the Web. By one count, there were 175 Web sites devoted to permitting, bidding, procurement, project management and...