Keep up with development in the infra construction industry. Before you know a decade has past by.

It was about ten years ago I stopped working in the Infra-construction industry. With many years of experience from the surveying and machine control manufacturers perspective I always thought that the steps towards the future, taken in ‘our’ industry, would not be that big. You can imagine my surprise when I came back to the industry just last year and fell right back into a market that has changed dramatically over the past decade.

First and foremost I must say that I’m probably one of the luckiest people on the planet to be able to start working for an organisation that actually took Infra construction to a whole new level. Where we used to work with numerous dedicated, separated and complicated data formats and software products in the past, Infrakit actually seemed to do it all within one framework.

Now that I’ve been working in the industry again for about six months it becomes apparent that the entire work field has changed, in a positive sense that is. More and more people are talking about integration, single point of truth, efficiency improvement and InfraBIM, terms that had little to no depth to them in the past. Now however it’s the actual way the business works!

In my meetings with customers it becomes clearer and clearer that every single infra construction companies develop their own strategy on dealing with data, dealing with documentation, reporting, using extensive ERP systems to automate processes that had been manual in ‘my time’. I’m really impressed, and moreover because Infrakit is, in many situations, an actual very important part in that process, in that strategy. It makes me smile every single time.

So, next to being part of that team, working close together with all my colleagues in the many countries, it made me think about the following ten years. So, if I would stop working in this industry and come back in 2029, what would have changed, what next steps would the industry have taken to be even more efficient, more productive. Well, going from my own experience now I know that Infrakit will be a major player in that field, not necessarily connecting people to machines or vice versa but I’m convinced that it will become more and more a ‘machine to machine’ environment, an environment that relies on IOT where people change their responsibilities from operator to remote operator or even supervisor of machines.

Automation on the factory floor hasn’t necessarily changed the number of people involved in the process, it has merely changed their responsibility and I expect to see the same changes in our field of work, the ever-beautiful field of Infra Construction. So I would like to call on all of you to keep track of the development of our market, before we know it it’s going to be 2029!

I can hardly wait!

Tiny Nuiten