In August, Triax Technologies joined our partners at Oracle Construction and Engineering for the unveiling of their Innovation Lab, a mock worksite based in Deerfield, IL that allows visitors to experience the potential of wearable and sensor technology, drones, autonomous vehicles, and visualization technology for themselves. We’re thrilled to participate in this effort to showcase the worksite of tomorrow, and around this exciting initiative, we interviewed Ben Sweet, our Chief Innovation Officer, about the importance of industry collaboration and integration partnerships.
Partnering with Oracle
As Chief Information Officer, I’ve been working closely with Oracle Construction and Engineering’s technical team. Our integration, which was announced in April, currently syncs Spot-r worksite information (workers, activities and hours) into Oracle Prime Projects Cloud Service project management platform. This is the first step towards developing a unified platform that enables improved, real-time resource and risk management (and pushes falls and alerts in our dashboard into Prime as issues, for example).
The entire team at Oracle has been great to work with and has been flexible in making changes to the Prime API as needed to support our integration efforts. They’ve also brought other industry partners together in the same room, which has been great for furthering innovation and collaboration in hopes of driving the industry towards further digitization.
Why real-world initiatives are important for the industry
The number one thing that our company hears from customers is they don’t want to have a hundred different applications, with a hundred different usernames and passwords. To avoid this issue, it’s important to partner with others like Oracle to share data. Our goal is to make it so clients have a “one-stop shopping” experience while still benefiting from the various innovations and improvements cutting-edge technologies (like ours) are bringing to the industry.
Every integration partnership starts with a small kernel: how can both sides achieve one specific use case? From there, both sides not only continue to evolve their own products but continue to consider how that evolution can affect the other side and deepen an integration to remove additional data silos.
It’s great to see the future of construction product innovation and integration in one place, and it’s exciting to know that the Lab will continue to grow with additional partners.
On the Worksite of Tomorrow
We’re seeing continued innovation at the jobsite in the form of project management and workers in the field using tablets, drones for capturing aerial imagery, or RFID for tracking materials. The worksite of tomorrow has all of this data combined in one easy-to-use system and includes additional data around workers – not just a basic schedule, but where they are. This can lead to improved efficiency by ensuring that materials and workers are in appropriate proximity to the work they’re doing; that equipment such as lifts are optimized to get workers where they need to be; and that safety continues to improve without additional effort overhead.
At Triax, we’re watching industries outside of construction for leading indicators of technologies and innovations that can – and will – impact our industry in the future, such as wearables and the miniaturization of electronics.
