| |JANUARY 202219Robotics solutions also automate heavy equipment and fleets for excavation, transportation, load lifting, concrete works and demolition. Ultimately, it increases safety of construction workers and significantly reduces operational time. Construction automation using robots increases the overall productivity of the project, reduces the labour requirement and provides safety for dangerous or hazardous tasks.Building Information ModellingBuilding planning and designing is a collaborative process that requires inputs from multiple stakeholders including engineers, architects, builders and clients among others. With the traditional method, it is difficult to visualize changes in real time as everyone works on their unique files. It results in generating multiple versions of the same plan and causes confusion. Advanced Building Information Modelling (BIM) tools solve this problem by providing a central database and enabling everyone to work on a single shared model.Green BuildingsSustainability is the main focus of many emerging construction projects across the country. Currently, it is time consuming and expensive to identify sustainable materials or processes for construction projects. Green building is a popular concept that adopts environmental friendly measures from pre-construction planning up to project closure and decommissioning. Green buildings optimize energy and resource utilization, reduce waste during construction and enable buildings to achieve net zero carbon emissions.Challenges Faced by EPC IndustrySafety Issues: Construction work is known for its reliance on highly physical and manual labour. Construction sites present many hazards to their workers. The injury rate of workers in construction industry is higher than the average of all other industries. The EPC Industry reported to have the highest accident rate of all other major industries, with the annual resulting cost estimated at $12 billion. Construction activities such as lifting, pulling, bending or pushing could result in injuries that last a lifetime further reducing productivity within the industry and increasing labour shortage.FEED Issues: Many EPC companies are also experiencing the common internal process challenge of having issues with front-end engineering and design (FEED) due to constant changes during the execution process. Data is isolated in spread-sheets or disconnected tools and is not available to inform the work of others. When data is added from another specialty, it is often entered manually which may introduce errors or omit valuable information.Future ScopeAll these developments mentioned above will require extensive up-gradation of processes and people in the EPC Industry. Extensive retraining and re-skilling initiatives will need to be adopted to retain and keep viable the existing experienced engineering talent because people are the real brain and backbone of the industry.
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