At the Renewable Energy Construction Summit, one opportunity stood out: using greater repeatability to do more with less.
By Ian Moss , marketing leader for Australia and New Zealand at Payapps – an Autodesk company.
At the recent Renewable Energy Construction Summit in Sydney, I had the opportunity to hear from industry experts about the challenges of delivering Australia’s renewable energy transition. One message in particular stayed with me. In a keynote on delivering renewable energy projects at scale, DT Infrastructure general manager of strategy Tom Perkin highlighted the need for the construction industry to find ways to do more with less.
We were told at the event that about $163 billion of energy infrastructure is expected to be delivered over the next five years, alongside a forecast workforce requirement of more than 500,000 people by 2027. So, how does the industry deliver more with constrained resources?
One of the points raised at the event was that construction productivity is tracking at roughly the same level as 40 years ago.
If the volume of infrastructure needing to be delivered is increasing while skilled resources remain constrained, the answer can’t simply be to keep adding more people.
Doing more with less shouldn’t mean asking already busy construction teams to work harder. It means finding ways to remove unnecessary work and make better use of the people and expertise already available.
Another of Perkin’s interesting comparisons was between construction and manufacturing. Manufacturing benefits from repetition. Processes are repeated, lessons retained and automation introduced, helping productivity improve over time.
Construction, by comparison, largely operates project by project. Different sites, designs, teams and conditions mean the learning and processes developed on one project can be diluted or reset when the next begins.
The argument wasn’t that every project should become identical. Instead, the opportunity is to identify more of the work that can be standardised and repeated, then carry those better ways of working from project to project.
That idea has a strong connection to the commercial side of construction and what we see at Payapps . Every project may be different, but many of the commercial processes behind them are fundamentally the same. Subcontractors submit progress claims. Commercial teams assess them. Variations are captured. Compliance is checked. Approvals happen.
Yet when these processes are managed through spreadsheets, email and locally developed workflows, individual project teams can end up creating their own way of working. Payapps enables contractors to standardise progress claims and associated commercial workflows across their projects. Instead of reinventing the process each time, contractors can establish a consistent approach and scale it across their portfolio.
National design and construction company Unita provides an example. After replacing spreadsheet-based processes with Payapps, Unita established a consistent progress claim process across its Australian projects and reduced claim assessment time by 60 per cent, while improving consistency across approvals, compliance, variations and retention. That’s what doing more with less can look like in practice.
The broader lesson from the summit was that improving construction productivity isn’t about expecting people to work faster. It’s about removing work that doesn’t need to be done, retaining what organisations learn and making better processes easier to repeat at scale. Renewable energy makes the challenge more visible, but the principle applies across the construction industry.
For Payapps, our role is specific: helping contractors turn progress claims from a process that can be recreated project by project into a standardised commercial workflow that can scale across the business. Every construction project may be different. The way progress claims are managed across them doesn’t have to be.
