Mace is an international consultancy and construction firm based in the UK. In an undertaking of considerable scope, the company acts as the main contractor in refurbishing Peterborough Court on Central London’s Fleet Street. As with several other projects, Mace has partnered with Aiforsite to maximize productivity at Peterborough Court.
With construction costs ballooning to unprecedented levels in recent years, extracting the maximum value out of worker hours is imperative. Aiforsite provides deeper insights into productivity in construction projects, revealing problems that should be addressed to optimize efficiency. Aiforsite makes use of advanced technologies to record data of the productivity on site and deliver that data to the user in a clear and actionable format. Additionally, Aiforsite’s Wendy AI assists in project management and productivity enhancement by automating various processes that would otherwise take up more of the construction professionals’ time, thus freeing people to focus on the essentials.
Vassos Chrysostomou, Chief Operating Officer at Aiforsite UK, says Aiforsite is meant to provide organizations in the construction industry with the tools, capabilities, and data to improve their productivity on a daily basis.
– I take great pride in making sure that the customers get what they need to make their businesses more productive and more efficient, and to make more money, Chrysostomou says as he lays out Aiforsite’s mission.
He points out that Aiforsite, and productivity improvement tools such as Real-Time Location System (RTLS), have enabled the industry to move away from 40% wasted tool time to less than 10%. Wasted tool time, or WTT, is an important metric indicating periods during which worker hours are not being effectively utilized on site. Many of the reasons behind these idle periods can be addressed through the awareness afforded by Aiforsite.
A more detailed picture
Steve Hawthorne, Project Director for Mace Interiors at Peterborough Court, feels Mace has always been an efficient contractor working with very efficient subcontractors. That said, the deep dive into productivity using Aiforsite and Wendy AI has uncovered room for improvement even in the daily workflow of Mace and its partners. For instance, Hawthorne brings up the logistics of workers moving around Peterborough Court’s extensive construction site.
– We have three basements and twelve stories above, so that’s fifteen floors. And the first thing I found from drilling into Aiforsite data was that some of the operatives were all over the site. It’s quite a lot of stairs to climb. So I’m hoping that I can make their lives easier and we can start to get them to work smarter and not harder.
That’s just one example of the sort of thing Hawthorne says he would not have considered if not for the data gleaned with Aiforsite’s tools. This aligns with the experience of Mark Reynolds, Chairman and CEO at Mace Group. He says Mace has adhered to the principles of Lean construction for coming up on 30 years now, but Aiforsite has taken the company’s measurement and optimization of productivity to a whole new level.
– We can assess and capture more information than we’ve ever been able to before. And more importantly, we’ve now got the tools to actually apply specifically to enable our teams to do their jobs much more quickly.
The future is in digital solutions
According to Reynolds, the digitalization brought by Aiforsite has greatly boosted the monitoring and enhancement of productivity at Mace.
– Aiforsite is a fantastic tool to help us measure productivity on site because it’s digitally enabled. We can actually see heatmaps of where people are working, we can actually understand start/finish times, and we can drive productivity and efficiency in the way we work.
Moving forward, Reynolds sees Mace, and the industry at large, leaning more heavily into digitalization to optimize the efficiency of job sites and benefit both workers and project managers. The partnership with Aiforsite ensures that Mace will remain on the cutting edge of developments in managing productivity.
– It’s a very quick-changing world at the present time. We see things evolving, and we will learn through the process. So I’m really excited about the tools available to us and what it can mean to our business in the future.
Watch the full video to see how Mace leverages Aiforsite’s cutting-edge smart technology to discover ways improve productivity.