Understanding BAM’s digital approach

Increasing understanding and thereby adoption of digital processes and technology is essential for BAM’s digital team to deliver its vision and short-term targets. Among the latter are the compliant use of BAM’s internally developed CDE on all projects, compliant site data capture, compliant information management execution and 19650 compliance.

That challenge must be seen in the context of how BAM was restructured a few years ago. Fannon reminds DC+: “The previous structure was regional digital teams. There were seven digital teams in [BAM] Construction, all doing different things. Our target operating model pulls all those teams into one large team. So, we’ve got about 95 people now, all with different skill sets, which allows us to deploy the best athlete to any job, which is a really powerful thing because we’ve now got strength in depth.”

That team is structured into three centres of excellence:

“We dial in the digital service, via the centres of excellence, to meet the project needs. It really works. It allows us to bring the best knowledge to a project,” Fannon explains.

Fannon reveals the digital capabilities BAM wants to invest in are managed through several digital portfolios:

He dives into more detail: “We have a digital building block framework that allows us to categorise all the digital capabilities that are deployed on projects, so we can start to analyse what worked well, what didn’t work well, and allow us to scale the technology.

“Reality capture is now a foundation technology in [BAM] Construction that uses visual intelligence to track progress. That allows us to offer to our clients full transparency. We can demonstrate that fire protection was installed on a particular day, for example. It offers us that deeper golden thread and full audit of the build process

“And we are piloting some AI progress tracking with Buildots. We have three projects right now, and we’re analysing internal processes to get the best from the technology and assessing the data capture and predictive functions of the AI. It takes out that optimism bias that we have in construction.

Many tier one contractors that have engaged with digital for more than a decade have begun to recognise that their tech stack is too large, featuring a number of software packages that are not used consistently across the business or, worse, barely used at all.

Fannon observes: “Like all main contractors in the past, we went out and bought every toy in the shop, and then realised that we didn’t need every toy. We can’t keep choosing the latest shiny tool, because change [from implementing that tool] is a challenge, and we know that. Within the proptech space, there’s rapid change: we can’t keep up with change, and if we keep swapping products, we’ll only frustrate our people.

“We want to systemise to scale, using less product, and partner with technology vendors to adopt their products to meet industry needs. We’ve done exactly that with Autodesk: we are working closely with them. They receive feedback from us about what the software can and what it can’t do. It’s in their roadmap to improve the full lifecycle approach across their platform ecosystem. We’re definitely doing more with less.

“The majority of our people are going to use maybe one or two or three pieces of technology: let’s be really useful and purposeful with those and drive as much value as possible.”

He emphasises: “We want all of our people throughout the whole of the UK and Ireland to do their job in the same way, on the same platform to improve the quality of data.”

Of course, the business remains open to innovations and new ideas, especially around AI, but here, Fannon reinforces his point: “The tech stack will be AI-enabled – just through the vendors applying AI to their products. BAM will then continue to mature its AI capability across our organisation.”

Harrison O’Hara is BAM’s DPS head of advancing technology and innovation. He echoes Fannon’s point and delves further into the contractor’s approach to AI: “The focus over the last two years has been a policy-first approach. I think a lot of businesses have just introduced AI into their organisations without any framework or rules in place, which is dangerous. We wanted to make sure that we got the policies there first and a strategic direction. For example, we’ve updated our IT acceptable use policy to state that we don’t expect BAM information to be uploaded onto any open or free applications.

“We’ve got enterprise solutions with AI capability that are secure within the BAM environment, and we expect people to be using those for any confidential information. We’ve also updated our supplier resilience questionnaire, so there’s an assessment specifically looking at AI for new vendors to make sure that we’re aware of how our data is being used by our supply chain and our vendors.”

The business is rolling out Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot. It’s mandatory for BAM staff to be trained on its use, with particular focus on safe and effective prompts. “We give them business examples of where we expect them to use it – and get them comfortable using it every day,” O’Hara explains.

“Autodesk contains a huge amount of information and data for us as a business, and making sure that information is accessible to the right people at the right time in a way that’s easily and quickly digestible is really important. And the AI assistant is fantastic at doing that. We’ve seen it work really well on specifications, and we’ve now got a clear roadmap on how that AI assistant is going to be expanded across their platform.”

But it’s not just the business-wide big names like Autodesk and SAP, he adds: “We’re also looking at specific AI applications designed with disciplines in mind. A good example is our legal team: they’re looking at the Litera tool, which compares contractual documents – it’s been trained with specific legal knowledge to be able to do that.”

O’Hara concludes by emphasising the considered and safe approach to AI: “It’s all about the human in the loop. With this process, we’re not expecting AI to replace or take away the responsibility of the end user. We’re still ultimately responsible for the work that we’re delivering on site – AI is here as a tool to accelerate what we can do as a job, not replace us.”

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