PCL Construction uses IoT with Azure to revolutionize the construction industry

Stantec Tower looms majestically over the skyline of Edmonton, in Canada’s beautiful and spacious western province of Alberta. At 251 meters—823 feet—this iconic tower is the tallest building in the city and the country’s tallest building outside of Toronto. Workers from Edmonton-based PCL Construction are in the process of adding 483 residential suites that will become the SKY Residences of ICE District.

Within the construction zone, there is movement everywhere as workers finish up the day’s work. Senior Project Manager for Stantec Tower and SKY Residences Myke Badry is just about to leave the job site when he looks at a readout on his mobile phone. “Hey guys,” he calls out, “there’s a temperature spike in unit 3102. Could you check that out?”

Workers discover that the heat in the unit was left on inadvertently, risking damage to the finish of new cabinetry they installed earlier in the day. They turn down the heat in time to prevent damage and head home for the evening without further checks—they know that any new issues will generate mobile alerts.

Grounding business transformation in the cloud

PCL is a major player in the construction industry, and construction is big business—it accounts for 13 percent of the global gross domestic product. The company has projects and offices throughout North America and around the world, along with an annual construction volume of CAD8 billion. Its goal is to not only drive revenue and business for itself, but also to drive value and satisfaction for its customers.

PCL has been in business for 112 years, but that doesn’t mean it’s old-fashioned—the company takes a modern approach when it comes to the role that technology plays to help run the business and manage construction. “The construction industry tends to be a laggard when it comes to technology,” says Chris Palmer, Senior Manager for Advanced Technology Services at PCL Construction. “And the result has been flat productivity, decreased margins, more schedule overruns, and increased competition. But we believe that through the adoption of technology and digitization, we can reverse that trend—not just for PCL but for the whole industry.”

Five years ago, PCL implemented a technology initiative based on four pillars: cloud, mobility, analytics, and integration. “Becoming a cloud-first business was the core of our strategy, and Microsoft Azure was our platform of choice,” explains Mark Bryant, Chief Information Officer at PCL Construction. “We moved most of our traditional IT processes and infrastructure to the cloud. We also rewrote and migrated our own applications to optimize them for the cloud and embraced SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. As a result, we’ve increased productivity, decreased risk, and sped time-to-market. Data has become a critical asset for us, and our decisions are now data-driven.”

Getting smart about buildings and building

Embracing the cloud helps PCL take new approaches to construction that, in turn, facilitate new approaches to what is possible for today’s modern cities. “In Canada, there is a strong push toward smart cities that make intelligent use of resources to offer a better place to live,” says Bryant. “At PCL, we like to say that you can’t have smart cities without smart buildings, and you can’t have smart buildings without smart construction.”

For building owners, smart buildings are a way to remain competitive and differentiate themselves from other developers. They need to drive down energy and maintenance costs while driving up tenant satisfaction and retention—and equip buildings to accommodate a modern workforce. “A smart building is future-proof,” says Palmer. “It adapts to changing lifestyles—for example, more people working from home—and includes things like smart parking systems that guide drivers to an open spot.”

PCL recognized that it needed to create smart buildings to keep new business flowing in, and the company embraced the Internet of Things (IoT) to make that happen. By enabling real-time data access and analytics, PCL can increase job-site safety, operational efficiencies, and worker productivity. “What we’re doing is disruptive in a positive way—we are dragging the whole industry into the twenty-first century,” says Bryant.

Technological innovation has tangible benefits as well. “A lot of money goes into environmental control at job sites—whether it’s maintaining just the right temperature and humidity for concrete to set or keeping workers comfortable,” says Palmer. “We spend upwards of CAD300 million a year on energy, and some of that is wasted. By using IoT to monitor environmental conditions around the clock, we can make our energy use smarter, aiming to save 10 to 20 percent of our energy costs through optimization. We’ll also reduce our environmental footprint and make the industry more sustainable, which is an important goal for us.”

Finding the right platform for the job site

PCL chose Microsoft Azure and Azure IoT technologies to serve as the foundation for its smart construction push. Moving assets to the cloud gives PCL the infrastructure, agility, and scalability it needs to maximize business efficiencies for the company and its customers. The cloud-first push was also the first step toward developing Job Site Insights^TM (JSI^TM), a construction management application that provides a single-pane view into all aspects of work at a job site.

JSI is built on Azure and is accessible through a desktop PC, tablet, or mobile device. It uses Microsoft Power BI dashboards and data visualizations that show everything from costs to quality metrics, schedules, and inspections. It connects the productivity tools in Microsoft Office 365 and uses a wide variety of Azure services, including Azure Digital Twins, to uncover deep insights into the data. The JSI platform can work with any compatible IoT sensors, and PCL is using mcThings IoT sensors in the SKY residences, with a minimum of one in each Stantec Tower unit. For a more detailed view of the JSI architecture, see the technical addendum.

“JSI was a product of listening to our customers, our consultants, and all the stakeholders in our business,” says Chris Gower, Chief Operating Officer for Buildings at PCL Construction. “It lets everyone understand what is happening at every stage of the process, from planning through construction, post-construction, and how the building is being used by its occupants. We’re adding value at every one of those stages.”

Driving decisions with data to dramatically transform work

The constant flow of real-time data from IoT sensors—plus decades of historical data from other PCL projects—not only aids in the monitoring of job sites right now, it provides PCL with an ever-increasing dataset it can use with Azure machine learning to do predictive analytics that make construction even smarter.

“We can use that data to work better, faster, and potentially change our processes through data analysis,” says Palmer. “A few years ago, PCL didn’t have an analytics group, but now we do. It’s dedicated to understanding our IoT data better, combining it with other data sources—cost schedules and incident reports, for example—and helping us gain new insights into how we work and where and how we can improve. These insights become new algorithms and methodologies within JSI that enable field workers to optimize performance without the need to know anything about data science.”

The move to the cloud and the use of IoT data to generate business intelligence has made a significant impact on the way PCL workers spend their time. IT professionals no longer focus on managing server and storage infrastructure—in fact, PCL has cut its hardware from more than 1,200 servers to just half of a single rack that handles all on-premises compute and storage. This reduced storage and server costs by CAD2.5 million a year and frees up the IT pros to focus on projects that add business value, rather than worry about applying patches or upgrading applications.

Job-site workers also have more time for value-added tasks. “We can use IoT sensors to check whether the temperature is correct, if the lights are on, or where particular materials are located,” says Bryant. “We don’t need to send a worker out to check. So, our people are doing a lot less menial work and instead are spending more time interacting with building owners and generating new ideas to improve customer satisfaction. We also prevent problems from happening, which reduces warranty claims—that helps our bottom line and keeps our customers happy.”

Keeping workers safe, giving building owners and tenants insight into the future

PCL is also using its Azure-based platform to promote worker safety. “Monitoring the air quality in an enclosed space is critical,” says Palmer. “By using Azure IoT technologies, we not only prevent staff from being exposed to dangerous conditions, but we also can see those conditions before or as they’re developing. With real-time IoT data, we can be more predictive about job-site issues and prevent situations that could lead to a safety incident.”

As a mobile-ready platform, JSI is available on workers’ mobile devices, so people in the field can get real-time data whenever they need it. It also helps PCL communicate precise status reports to the building owners, so they know exactly how construction is going. “The Internet of Things has brought ‘smart’ to a whole new level,” says Bryant. “We understand our business better, and we provide our customers with better service—it facilitates a level of collaboration and real-time data insights we haven’t seen before.”

At the Stantec Tower site, the PCL investment in new technology goes beyond the cloud and JSI. The company is also using Microsoft HoloLens for planning and modeling the residential interiors. “We use HoloLens to mock up a complete suite floor with all the furnishings in it,” says Badry. “Within that mockup, we can peel back layers of construction—drywall, studs, pipes—and plan the intricacies of the work behind the walls. Our client now uses the HoloLens model as a sales tool, so residents get an immersive view of what their new home will look and feel like.”

Continuing the digital journey after a successful transformation

The last few years have seen a lot of changes at PCL, and the Stantec Tower project is just the first step into an exciting new future for the company—one that embraces technology and aims to transform the industry.

For Palmer, it’s important that Microsoft has built its own success on technologies like Azure. “Microsoft has invested heavily in the cloud,” he says. “They’ve got skin in the game and that gives us confidence that they’re going to do what’s necessary to support PCL and make us successful. Together we’re building the construction site of the future.”

The company’s work at Stantec Tower is a showpiece for PCL, according to Bryant. “I’m very proud and impressed with what my team has done to transform the way we work,” he says. “This project shows what is possible when an industry that is traditionally resistant to change takes a chance and embraces digitalization. As we continue our digital journey, Microsoft will be a critical resource for the success of our ecosystem of products, services, and solutions.”

For Badry, it’s exciting to see the changes that are happening in the field. “It’s great to see the construction industry evolving, adapting, and embracing technology to bring real-time information into processes that are hundreds of years old,” he says. “These advances make our jobs easier every day.”

Technical addendum: Drilling down into Job Site Insights

When it comes to Azure, PCL has gone all in, taking advantage of almost every service available. The graphic below shows a high-level architecture overview of the Job Site Insights platform and the key Azure services it uses.

PCL uses Azure IoT spatial intelligence capabilities for ingesting and processing job-site IoT data. Spatial intelligence wires the various Azure services, including Azure IoT Hub, into a single service that provides the core business logic and building topology required to manage a construction site. Azure makes it possible to correlate devices deployed on the job site with the spaces, materials, assets, and people located there.

Low-power devices send telemetry to an Azure IoT Edge gateway at the construction site. IoT Edge delivers centralized administration of the devices, and it provides opportunities to move processing, such as stream analytics, machine learning, or business logic, to the edge in the future.

The telemetry is sent from the IoT Edge to the IoT Hub cloud gateway using the spatial intelligence capabilities. JSI applies tolerance-based business rules to the telemetry stream in near real time using Azure Stream Analytics, and exceptions are passed to Azure Service Bus for downstream processing. Stream Analytics also passes real-time data to Azure Time Series Insights, where users can do ad hoc interactive trending and heat maps.

Azure Service Fabric clusters (JSI services) provide additional processing and a spatial intelligence API wrapper for mobile and web-based user interfaces.

Ultimately, the data is routed to Azure Data Lake for cold storage, and additional analytics can be performed there using Azure Data Lake Analytics.

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