Over the past two decades Ed’s career has evolved from a mechanical engineer, grappling with clunky industry software, to a software engineer focused on improving the digital tools available to his peers in the construction engineering and manufacturing sector. He joins Basesite after 4 years working for Tesla on their first European facility, Gigafactory Berlin.
We talked to him about his journey to get here.
“For over 20 years I’ve witnessed the digital evolution first hand –starting from the early days of Web 2.0, when user generated internet content started to emerge, to today – where AI seems to generate most of it. Frustrated by the slow pace of digital adoption in the construction engineering industry, I’ve steered my career towards replacing traditional paper-based workflows with data driven web-based tools.”
Digitization in construction is behind other industries
“In other industries like finance and retail, seamless data exchanges are taken for granted”. This centralised data approach is still relatively immature in the construction engineering sector. Engineering teams still wrestle with scattered files and manual updates. “We should move away from sharing files and towards sharing data.” Today’s generation has grown up with the internet, and all their devices are automatically in sync.“Your calendar on your phone shows the same schedule as the one on your computer. If you told a new employee that they had to manually update both devices with their appointments, you’d get some funny looks”
Yet believe it or not this is often how data is still managed today in ‘heavy’ industries like construction and engineering. Data may exist “in the cloud”, but it typically still lives inside files, which don’t talk to each other easily. An excel file might contain calculations and numerical data, and a corresponding AutoCAD diagram might display results of those calculations in some kind of schematic or layout representation. In most cases, this data is not linked, so one change in the calculations, means a manual update of the diagram (and vice versa). In a typical construction project this means hundreds or thousands of data points that need to be kept manually in sync. In today’s rapidly moving digital world, this is simply not viable.
Experiencing pain points first hand
Entering the industry as a Mechanical Engineer allowed Ed to experience the pain points first hand. “Engineering often consists of receiving data in some file, which inevitably needs to be ingested into some other software or system” he explained. “The worst for me was the data entry side of things – receiving data in one format and having to manually copy it into another, such as updating a drawing with a bunch of revised pipe flow rates”. “Tedious and time-consuming tasks are not how engineers want to spend their day, so they are likely to rush, lose concentration and human errors inevitably creep in. If you eliminate the drudgery of these repetitive tasks, bandwidth opens for creative engineering thinking which is of course more strategically valuable. Properly structured data also presents many opportunities for optimization and rapid iteration”.
Beyond human scale and speed
These challenges are magnified by the huge scale and fast pace of industrial projects nowadays, such as battery and semiconductor facilities and sheer rate of changes. “On GigaBerlin, the one thing that was certain was change. I often used to joke that it was a construction project acting like a software project, with features and bug fixes being added and deleted like a ‘git push’ - even though some were already set in stone (or in this case – concrete!). To cope with such rapid changes, you need to have some kind of single source of truth, which can only really be achieved with workflows that reference a common a data store like a database. Add this to challenges of Germany’s largely paper-based permitting process and you have some real friction to overcome, but that’s another story!”
Human factors
Implementing these digital methods has not been without challenges. “Technology is probably the easy part – getting people on board is more difficult.” Resistance to change can be either because the method used on the last project is the safer bet, or reluctance to learn new methods and upskill. Teams are often fragmented, working in silos, and for one reason or another don’t want to share their data with others. “Technology can only take you so far – mind sets need to change, and value needs to be attached to appropriate data exchange. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had some forward-thinking senior colleagues who have supported my efforts over the years".
“I’m happy to join like-minded people at Basesite, many of whom are engineers first, building tools to solve the real-world problems they have faced”
