The value of Information Management in construction

How are construction and infrastructure organisations creating, managing, and making use of quality and timely information?

What value does this deliver for those organisations as well as their customers and wider stakeholders?

Advances in digital technologies and data are transforming how our economy functions and the way we live our lives. The built environment is becoming smarter, with the rise of intelligent infrastructure enabled by the use of techniques such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. It drives efficiencies and optimises the performance of the nation’s built assets, which will help us to deliver on our national policy objectives to Build Back Better, Level Up the economy and transition to Net Zero.

Access to information (as data) of the right quality and at the right time, in a format that is trusted by all parties, is increasingly recognised as a critical enabler of the construction sector’s digital transformation, with the potential to both drive down costs in the construction and operation of built assets and drive up quality. However, there remains limited evidence on the holistic benefits of these practices.

The KPMG and Atkins study for the Centre for Digital Built Britain, as a partner of the Construction Innovation Hub, provides demonstrable evidence of benefits within and beyond the organisations using Information Management (IM). This evidence suggests the economic case for investing in IM is threefold, by helping to unlock:

1. Direct productivity gains for organisations which use IM;
2. Increased growth across the wider UK economy as a result of those productivity gains; and
3. Social value to customers, wider society, and the environment from the role of IM in helping to deliver higher quality and more sustainable built assets.

Our analysis of 11 case studies found that the use of IM could potentially secure between £5.10 and £6.00 of direct labour productivity gains for every £1 invested in IM, and between £6.90 and £7.40 in direct cost savings (from reductions in delivery time, labour time and materials). We have also found evidence of costs savings at various stages of the asset lifecycle, ranging from 1.6 per cent to 18 per cent depending on the lifecycle stage.

The study also includes analysis of illustrative scenarios of sector-wide adoption of IM, which suggests that every £1 of direct productivity gain today (2021) in the design, construction and maintenance of built assets could potentially translate into £3.70 in annual UK GDP in 2051 (in today’s prices).

Please contact us or speak with your usual KPMG contact to discuss the study. Please also contact us  if you’d like to get a copy of the case studies.