How to prepare your business for a successful digital transformation

Technology has played an integral role in helping the construction industry overcome recent challenges and adapt to new ways of working. Contractors must embrace these technological advances and digitally transform their businesses now if they want sustainable growth in the future.

Many contractors understand that a digital transformation is necessary but with so many competing demands it’s easy to push it off for later. While it is a big undertaking, proper planning can help streamline the process. Here are five steps to help your business launch a successful digital transformation:

1. Get the CEO and all stakeholders on board

Change management needs to start from the top. CEOs should have the vision and the understanding of future trends and anticipate what tomorrow’s clients will expect. They must get senior management on board with all changes and provide them with the budget, people, time, and resources needed to achieve this transformation. When all stakeholders are invested in the process, they can begin to see a shift in how everyone works and bring about meaningful change throughout the business.

2. Develop a digital transformation strategy

Once the digitalization commitment runs from top to bottom, senior management should establish a clear strategy for the change management and digital transformation process to take place.

It is important to clearly define expectations such as:

• How will the company benefit from digital transformation?
• What type of construction management software is needed to support digitalization?
• What result do we expect from digital transformation?
• What strategies should we implement? (Consider both the project level and enterprise level.)
• What are the key milestones?

3. Start with a small group

Implementing change throughout an entire organization can be challenging, so it can help to roll out the process with a small group. For example, you could start digitalization within your design or planning teams to develop the workflows and standards that the rest of the organization will adopt. This way you can evaluate what is working well and what could use some improvement and adjustment before implementing the new processes and workflows in other departments.

4. Integrate with other departments

After the design or planning department is digitalized, the next step is to bring more departments, such as cost estimation, procurement, and site teams, into the BIM model-based workflows. The goal is complete digital integration, with everyone utilizing standardized workflows and connected data for enterprise-wide projects.

5. Expand your scope of service

The business environment is changing fast so it’s important to remain agile in order to compete in the current market. Business models and business scope should evolve concurrently to ensure you’re able to respond quickly to market demands. This includes utilizing technology to add new business divisions such as prefabrication.

Laying your digital foundation

The key to long-term digital transformation success is to adopt an enterprise-level platform as the digital foundation for your business. It is crucial that it has an open API for the wider supply chain to adapt to future changes. This way, as the organization evolves, additional solutions can be integrated and interconnected onto this platform, eliminating costly stopgap measures that only help in the short-term.