How to reduce risk and plan, bid, and build more efficiently through the use of technology

The Propcast

How to reduce risk and plan, bid, and build more efficiently through the use of technology with René Morkos and Shane Richardson

February 21, 2023 

In the second episode of Season 11 of the Propcast, host Louisa Dickins is joined by René Morkos, the Founder and CEO of ALICE Technologies, the world’s first construction optioneering platform and Shane Richardson, President of Lagrange, a management consulting firm providing project controls and program management services.

Check out the podcast as published here.

Episode Highlights:

• The founding story behind ALICE Technologies and the problems it was designed to solve
• The difference between the two products, ‘Alice Pre-Construction’ and ‘Alice Manage’ and their capabilities
• How Rene and Shane met and how they started working together
• How to use data to make better informed decisions
• The hesitancies the construction industry have around technology
• The issues they face and potential missed opportunities if they are brought in part way through a project, rather than the beginning
• Early innovators in the space and their impact on implementation and integration
• The biggest changes they have seen within the industry and what they predict over the next 20 years
• The importance of finding the right tool when trying to digitalise data to increase productivity
• Where they believe the skill gaps currently are in construction tech
• ALICE’s sustainability pledge

Key Takeaways:

• What resources do you need to build to perform those tasks? That’s the kind of information you give the system, and then the system generates 6 million different ways of building the project for you. – Rene
• I noticed that was one of the things that wasn’t being leveraged; how can we use this data to make better informed decisions? -Shane
• A lot of times you’re already 20 plus percent complete with a project, and there’s a certain point where you can always minimise risk, minimise costs on a project, but as you progress on a project, the further you progress, you lose out on that opportunity. – Shane
• What’s happening in construction today is what happened to manufacturing in the seventies and eighties. It’s really becoming digitised. It’s becoming integrated across the supply chain. – Rene
• I think that’s one of the reasons why construction projects were plagued with delays, for decades and decades. It’s because how do we fix that problem of being able to translate accurate data in its schedule, maintain it, and so ALICE takes care of that.  – Shane
• The way that I perceive it is that one of the major skill gaps is that construction is getting converted into algorithmic terms. And so that’s something that’s relatively new.  – Rene
• McKinsey article: over the last 20 years the industry as a whole has only only increased 1% in productivity. And the construction spending is about 13% of the world’s GDP. And so you think about that, it’s over 1.3 trillion in opportunity to try to leverage. – Shane