At Oracle’s Leveraging Jobsite Imagery for Project Controls Summit at the Oracle Industry Lab, Neeraj Garg presented Jobsite Driving Technology for the Enterprise – And How We Got Here.
Neeraj provides a retrospective spanning nearly four decades, highlighting the evolution of technology and its impact. He compares this progression to the current state of the construction industry and forecasts the future of technology in both front and back-office operations.
Join Neeraj as he walks through the evolution of Jobsite and Back Office technology, tracing its impact on the construction and engineering industry. Delve into each decade’s milestones, innovations, and transformations that shaped the digital and physical project landscape. Explore the parallels between this dynamic progression and the construction industry’s current state while gaining insights into the future trajectory of technology integration in both the front and back offices.
Watch the live session on-demand:
About Neeraj Garg
Neeraj has 30+ years of project technology experience. Before joining Project Partners, he spent over 12 years building and enhancing the Oracle E-Business Suite Projects applications and the initial design for Fusion Cloud PPM, including serving as Oracle’s Chief Architect and director of product management. At Project Partners, Neeraj expertly guides the team as an Executive Consultant to deliver complete industry solutions for customers using Oracle Cloud and Oracle E-Business Suite applications, ensuring that their systems help our clients achieve targeted business. Neeraj led the customer advisory boards for the Engineering & Construction and Government Contracting industries while at Oracle. At Project Partners, he continues to provide our customers with industry best practices and business processes while enabling Oracle applications to automate these processes.
Historical Summary of AEC Technologies
In the 1980s, you had General Ledger-based systems. You relied solely on GLs you created for your project’s chart of accounts and collected data based on those GLs. The PMIS solutions we know today were not in existence.
The 90s moved into job costing and project accounting applications, and that’s when teams started leveraging scheduling applications in the front office and on job sites. Scaling applications, spreadsheets, and a lot of paper were also prevalent then. Suppliers, customers, and architects frequently exchanged paper back and forth. If you got into litigation, you had to shift reams of paper from one place to another and to the courthouses to ensure that you could get that litigation addressed correctly. Even today, that continues to a certain extent on many construction job sites. Many AEC organizations automate these manual processes with document management tools like Aconex, Procore, Kahua, and other technologies.
In the 2000s, you first started seeing the integration between the front-office applications, the job site applications, and the back-office applications (project accounting). Furthermore, as you move into the 2010s, more innovations were being developed for job site applications, like BIM, progress measurement, IoT, and equipment tracking tools. As the industry shifted into its current state, there were more automation project tasks and a need for a standardized approach to integrating front office (PMIS, Project Execution/Management) and back office (ERP) applications.
The industry should start preparing for the future of upcoming technologies and how their data will impact back-office decisions; a lot of new technologies and tools will come into play—like autonomous robots and remote tools currently being deployed at a small scale. However, with all these new technologies, organizations must continue to upgrade and integrate their project financial and project management/execution tools to enable their teams to work alongside the construction industry’s future.
Watch the live 30-minute video to explore these topics further and browse the presentation deck:
