Digital transformation is imperative for the heavy building materials sector, but the industry is still at the low end of the maturity curve in the process.
Those are among the findings in a newly-published white paper from construction software solutions company
The study covers the principles that stakeholders should follow to establish a strong foundation in the journey to digitalisation.
It defines digital transformation as taking action to: eliminate waste from the value chain; break down the silos between functional groups and IT systems; integrate electronically with all trading partners; treat data as an asset; leverage network-based business intelligence, optimisation, and analytics tools to convert data into actionable intelligence.
The research assesses the challenges associated with digitalisation, strategies for successful process changes, and recommendations for companies in the heavy building materials (HBM) domain who want to move up the digital transformation maturity curve.
“The Heavy Building Materials industry has unique challenges for contractors, DOTs [departments of transportation], haulers and material suppliers, with added complexities ranging from new tariffs on building materials, higher customer expectations, and increased regulations and compliance,” said Craig Tate, chief revenue officer at Command Alkon. “Paper-based processes can slow the job cycle, leading to missed deliveries and untimely payments. We are in an age where processes involving ordering, delivery, and payment of materials need to be automated to drive efficiencies and provide visibility to all stakeholders.”
Adelante SCM president Adrian Gonzalez stated that the opportunities for cost savings, productivity, and customer service improvements from digitalisation are arguably greatest in the HBM industry when taking into account the amount of manual and paper-based processing that currently takes place
"It’s important for trading partners to integrate electronically to provide a shared, common platform to digitally capture information that can be analysed for what is happening to make continual improvements across the HBM supply chain,” said Gonzalez.
The complete white paper is available at:
