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Interview
“ Following a short stint working in Poland, I joined WS Atkins and spent eight years in research and innovation; our team was called VROOM( Virtual Reality and Object- Oriented Modelling Systems), and we explored emerging technologies to see how they could be applied in the real world. We were one of the first adopters of Navisworks and Revit, which are now well-established Autodesk solutions. When I left there, I worked for another engineering consultancy and have always tried to push the digital agenda, but from an organic, non-prescriptive perspective,” he explains.
“ I enjoy helping companies and their customers leverage tools to work smarter, not harder. I’ ve also worked on best practices and just over 15 years ago, was hired by Autodesk to join a new program around enterprise. I was the first customer success manager outside the US and went on to work in business development for over ten years. For the last two and a half years however, I’ ve been in a new role, where I try to intentionally manage how we work with professional institutions, mostly with a North American and European bias, but still very much a global role nonetheless.”
New ways of working
Over the past four decades, millions of people have trusted Autodesk’ s Design and Make technology to transform how their products are made. In the process, the company has transformed what can be made. Today, Autodesk’ s solutions span countless industries and empower innovators around the globe. With Autodesk Construction Cloud, teams can collaborate securely and quickly, so projects can be delivered on time and on budget. Connected tools for every workflow ensure projects can be managed from design to done.
“ Across the construction sector,” Marek continues,“ not every organization is the same. Introducing technology and processes at higher tiers of the supply chain is one thing but trying to convince those at the lower tiers who may not have the capacity to invest in technology or are not being engaged or educated correctly is something completely different. This creates the problem of a multi-speed industry, where only some are embracing new solutions and options.
“ Whether driven by legislation, mandates or contractual obligations, people tend to do the bare minimum to fulfil their contracts, and partly so, because they’ re busy. Our industry is under-resourced. Many businesses have full order books but don’ t have time to pay attention to implementing appropriate and value-adding technology. A cost-based mentality still pervades; people tend to look for the lowest cost as opposed to the best solution. As such, we need to move from short-term thinking to look at the value derived from technology over the longer term. There needs to be a realization or acknowledgement that traditional ways of working are not in some way better or less risky than investment and adoption of technology enabled digital workflows. We must get away from accepting waste, error, rework as just the way it is in the AEC industry; it can be more exciting, fun and stimulating by making technology an enabler of a new age of construction.
“ A lack of resources and challenges such as increasing material prices, means that we probably need to innovate in terms of how we do things,” he adds.“ From reusing materials to robotics or 3D printing, there’ s a degree of inevitability that we can’ t carry on as is. While we’ re still quite some way away from this, when I worked at the University of Reading in the mid-90s for example, a colleague spent some time in Japan where they were already experimenting with technology, like robots, on construction sites. Japan’ s ageing population necessitates finding new ways of working, and I think we’ re all in the same space to a certain degree. So, we haven’ t quite cracked it yet,
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