Traditional planning doesn’t work on site because of the dynamic nature of onsite activities. livSYT is a bottom-up solution that delivers onsite activity level visibility and control in real time. By fundamentally shifting site operations to AI-driven environment, livSYT enables targeted improvement initiatives. Thumu Karthik Reddy, Founder, livSYT (by Devin), shares more…What are the current challenges faced by the construction industry?In India we are facing a major challenge of shortage of adequate skilled resources across industry. We also fall short in proper planning and execution of projects due to lack of relevant technology and support system in the country. Since, most big players serve the government, the government’s mandate to go with the lowest bidder has also made it challenging to create an ecosystem focussing on quality and holistic evolution of the industry.What do you think is the best way to overcome these challenges? Where do you view the importance of Information Technology in tackling these challenges?To solve this, the govt. agencies have to change their approach of selecting contractors through lowest bid while our contractors need to put a lot of mind to improving their processes to put them in a place to achieve better quality and reduce timelines and costs.While Indian construction industry is grappling the use of BIM to improve design efficiency and construction logistics planning in large engineering projects, we lag behind in adopting technology for on-site execution of work which has already shown value to the contractors globally. This is because of the lack of home-grown solutions that tackle Indian challenges. Even our biggest contractors still face issues of visibility from construction site where huge (>10%) loss happen due to misalignment or miscommunication of the multiple stakeholders involved. A home-grown IT solution can, at the very least, help iron out these visibility and communication challenges and help contractors put their processes in place.Why is it critical for the construction stakeholders to focus on robust process implementation across construction lifecycle?It is important for any organization to continuously improve their processes to stay ahead of their competition or they just tend to perish.How does livSYT ensure seamless resource mobilisation and real-time holistic visibility?livSYT allows people to list down very easily all the activities that need to be done on site, including inspections, and provides a platform where all the stakeholders are able to communicate and get relevant job alerts.Rework and wastage of materials is one challenge that projects face. How can projects overcome this? What is the solution that you bring in?At the end of the day we are engineers and any project is an engineering process that need to be implemented in a systematic manner. livSYT tracks the individual activities and micro-activities in these processes, provides job-aids to users and ensures no step is skipped to help organizations in robust implementation of their on-site processes. Thus, the failure rate is proactively reduced, saving time and cost.How is the general response of the industry to the emerging technological advancements?Indian construction industry has been a slow adopter of new technologies because in India, the patience to make long term investments is lower due to the cost constraints. Also, we as a country are less experimental and trust more on tried and tested solutions which reduces the opportunity to create a home-grown solution that fits our context. However, we believe this is changing and we are optimistic that India will see new technologies coming up in this industry.From which segment do you see the maximum demand coming in for your offering/service?While livSYT can be used across sectors, we see linear construction projects such as roads, metros etc. taking the maximum benefit out of our solution and that is where we see our AI driven solution bringing maximum profitability.Can you share a success story of a complex project –how did livSYT help in digitisation and hence enabling real-time monitoring?Metro projects are inherently complex with innumerous micro-activities to be done on site. In one such project, livSYT helped its client save more than 70% time in RFI and defect cycle through elimination of time wastage in physical filling, movement and submission of paperwork and more than 95% time in dashboards and reports generation by eliminating manual preparation of dashboards, DPRs and MPRs resulting in huge monetary benefit to the client. The client has decided to implement livSYT in all their metro projects.Looking into the future, do you see any impact of AI. Any new areas or segments that the company is yet to tap into and we could see it making inroads?Looking at how AI helped the manufacturing by automating various processes and drawing a comparison how there is a lot of repeatability in construction processes, the data collected from sites can be used to set benchmarks. In this regards I see a big role that AI can play in construction, but it will take a time of 4-5 years for us to reach this stage.At livSYT, our goal is to save time and money for our clients through optimization of on-site operations. As of now, we are successfully serving metro and road contractors but we see very interesting requirements coming in from defence, government agencies and municipalities for gauging the contractors for repeated repair works like potholes etc. Our system can benchmark contractors’ performance and make a rating system where I see an opportunity to benefit the government agencies.