Three experts share how their industries are transforming — and how they are innovating

In the previous wrap-up of our recent webinar, Innovation in industry: Real approaches to change and transformation, we explored some of the key takeaways from how manufacturing and building organisations are dealing with ongoing industry challenges while at the same time innovating with modern tech solutions.

In this second and final deep-dive, we hear from three expert panellists about how their firms have accelerated their plans for innovation in order to keep up with recent challenges, the unexpected benefits of digital transformation, and their predictions for how their industries will evolve in the coming months and years.

A widespread shift to distributed offices

In years gone past, the mere thought of an architecture firm running any part of a job — let alone an entire project — off-site would have been tantamount to apathy. After all, there must be high levels of communication between design, engineering, consulting and a range of other teams at every stage of a project. But for Jessica Lee, principal at Fender Katsalidis, the ubiquity of architecture software combined with widespread digital transformations across the industry has seen distributed offices become the rule rather than the exception.

“It’s just become the new normal,” Lee explains. “We realised that we don’t actually have to be all together in a site shed — we can actually work from our distributed offices with our engineers, our clients and our builders taking care of comms on Zoom.”

Lee says this has been an unexpected benefit of shifting a majority of their daily communications to online-only. Builders are now able to directly reach out to architects and get them to flush up the model on their screen to discuss any particularities of the job at hand.

“Back in the day, we weren’t able to bring our 3D models with us to site because it would’ve meant we had to bring our entire desktop or our network with us,” she adds. “Now, as everyone is just tuning into a screen and we can point to an area of conflict or clashes that need resolving as a design team, that’s just become normal. No one is in a hurry to get back into a site shed with the old A1 drawings and marking up everything with our highlighters and trace papers.”

You can watch the full webinar, Innovation in industry: Real approaches to change and transformation, on demand for even more insights.

Adapting to the challenges of today through digital adoption

While the pandemic forced organisations to revisit how they approach technology in their day-to-day operations, it also mobilised software companies to tweak their products for the surge of remote workers. Whether it’s a videoconferencing platform or a custom piece of manufacturing software, Gary Smith, CEO at BioPak, says making the most of these solutions has helped his team ride out the uncertainties of the past few years.

“Having Zoom is unbelievable,” he says. “We operate in five different states across Australia and in five different countries around the world. Before online meetings, that meant twice-weekly interstate travel, so it’s been excellent having everyone with no expectations of travel and just communicating digitally via Zoom. It’s been a rapid enhancer in our business for communication.”

Smith says BioPak is so successful thanks to the tireless work of the technology individuals that drive his team. While BioPak struggled to find top talent during the height of COVID, their cadre of tech specialists used this period to tweak their system architecture and approvals process to be more streamlined, thereby increasing productivity.

“For us to design a product, there are multiple steps and they involve manufacturing, customer approval, internal designers, graphic artists and many more,” Smith says. “We digitised it so that once a step has been achieved, it automatically automates the communication to the next process owner.

“That type of system architecture and process improvement is essential. There are very smart people in our industry, and we want to bring them into our business to enhance the pace of that progress, as it is a differentiator between companies that can give quality of service versus those that can’t.”

Predicting what awaits around the next corner

While no one could have anticipated the challenges of the COVID years, business leaders in the manufacturing and building sectors need to be prepared for what comes next. Without a crystal ball to predict the future, that’s a constant struggle. But Sally McPherson, CEO at Constructiv Technologies, believes a focus on innovation — and, importantly, consolidation of technologies — can help strengthen organisations against a range of eventualities.

“My focus at the moment is bringing together all of these different technology solutions,” she says. “Our partnership with MYOB is definitely part of trying to bring the right technologies to the industry. What I imagine for the future of construction suppliers is ‘one desktop’ where you can do everything you need to do. From that desktop, you can keep your gear and your crews working, you can keep them on-site, you can keep them safe, and you can get more out of your business and your bottom line. It’s a big, ambitious dream.”

Read now: Webinar insights: Innovation through tech in the manufacturing and building sectors