Ongoing Projects
Every year the GLCM team gets divided into several teams working closely with industry experts and executives on a variety of topics that goes under Strategic Management. Over the last few years, the GLCM has been giving more focus to two areas: (1) Digital Transformation in Construction; and (2) Decarbonization.
Please also check out our past projects to read examples (not the full reports) of what the GLCM team has been working on since inception.
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The topics below assist Engineering and Construction firms to learn trends that are shaping the way we do business and deliver construction and infrastructure projects nationally and internationally:
Culture Changes in the Rise of Digital Transformation
Corporate culture in the construction industry has been changing, with these shifts being driven by multiple factors. The main objective of this project is to understand how culture is changing with the rise in technological trends and growing entrepreneurial culture among younger generation employees (Millennials and Generation Z) by examining the business implications, productivity, initiatives launched, and strategies deployed by firms to restructure employee engagement and business model.
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Additionally, there has been a rise in the prominence of e-sharing and the circular economy. With this evolution and younger entrepreneurial minds, it has become important for companies to accommodate change and shape their culture according to the needs of the market. The implications of the same towards work culture and the business environment of a company have been elucidated. This project focuses on identifying examples of various companies in the AEC, Real Estate, and Equipment Rental industries that have launched successful initiatives to embrace these cultural shifts. This information is being used to formulate an essential framework and strategy recommendations for the E&C firms to improve productivity and help other companies streamline their work culture accordingly.
Digital Landscape
Global Leaders in Construction Management, GLCM, team is studying the impact and the implementation of digital transformation in the A/E/C industry. The focus is on the top 20 ENR engineering firms and the top 20 ENR Construction companies across the United States. Each company is individually analyzed through the lenses of People, Process and Technology for the innovations implemented by them with respect to the market trends, challenges faced, and solutions provided by them. Moreover, we are speaking with the innovation industry leaders and C-suite executives within each organization to understand business implications, strategies on employing latest technology from a pilot project to enterprise wide adoption. We will be analyzing the data collected to see similarities, differences, and common trends and categorize value propositions between companies. This work will aid the AEC industry in understanding the progress of digital transformation and setting clear goals, recommendations and focus areas to enhance it in the upcoming years.
Decarbonization for the Global Construction Industry
At the 26th UN Climate Change conference (COP26) in November, governments will outline steps they each need to take to limit global warming. Hundreds of cities and private companies have already pledged to get to “Net Zero” – removing as much COâ‚‚ as they produce – by 2050. The global construction industry is the largest producer of waste materials and significant amounts of COâ‚‚ which are produced through the extraction, fabrication, transportation, and installation of new building assets.
According to a recent report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), direct building COâ‚‚ emissions need to halve by 2030 to get on track for net zero carbon building stock by 2050 in order to ensure that the targets of the Paris Climate Accord are met. The building and construction industry need to become a climate leader in moving the needle toward this goal.
Many, if not most, of the largest engineering and construction companies in the world are committing to actions that mitigate the production of carbon across all aspects and phases of their business. But, the basis of any route map is, first, to understand where things are today and then to deploy a variety of techniques to achieve the stated goals. This project, which is being developed in collaboration with Turner & Townsend - one of the construction industry’s leading global consulting firms, studies methods and solutions for developing a baseline, using proven quantifiable measures, to achieve individual carbon reduction goals.
Development of an Adaptability-Maturity Index (AMI) for Cities
In the perspective of the modern day 21st century, smart cities are emerging as the pioneers in facilitating sustainable, clean, energy efficient and optimised infrastructure development throughout the world. However, after the devastating effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic, a sharp plummet is observed in the overall performance efficiency of well-established urban infrastructure of megacities across the globe. Therefore, a strong requirement is felt not only to plan and design a system which utilises data and technology to create efficiencies, improve sustainability, promote economic development and enhance quality of life but also to strategize the development of an urban infrastructure which is capable of recovering from any imposed unforeseen stressors, risks and shocks within a short timeframe with minimal amount of damage imparted to its community. This acts as a stepping stone to delve deeper into the concept of an adaptable city which is an upgraded version of a smart city or the next-level smart city characterised by high damage recovery potential and the capacity to respond promptly and revert back to its normal functional performance once disturbed from its stable equilibrium state.
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The GLCM program is primarily focussed on developing an Adaptability Maturity Index (AMI) for cities which can quantify the performance efficiency of global urban systems on a common adaptability scale. The preliminary phase of this project revolves around identification of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which governs and controls a city’s adaptability to a fast-paced, dynamic changing environment and their impact on the AMI. Subsequently, this idea can be extrapolated further to design suitable and appropriate weight factors/functions through analytical or statistical methods which control the degree of correlation of each indicator and the extent of their contribution to the final AMI. The big picture big objective is to identify the weak links/deficiencies and lack of coordination among several critical infrastructures within an urban environment which play a pivotal role in combating unanticipated disasters or hazards and identify potential areas of improvement to ameliorate the performance efficiency and adaptive capacity of the urban system. Finally, we aim to consolidate the effects of multifarious components, subcomponents and performance indicators to generate a global level computation model for quantification of the AMI and apply this approach to operating cities to compare their level of adaptability on a common scale and propose suitable corrective actions to further improve their recovery performance when subject to shock loads.
