Working with Oracle to bring location intelligence to construction

Just north of Chicago, a new project from Oracle is under construction that will redefine efficiency and optimization in the construction industry.

There is a new construction zone in Deerfield, Illinois. Slightly smaller than a football field, it has everything you could expect: an office trailer, various construction vehicles, an array of building materials, a dedicated delivery road… All the things you would normally see at a job site.

But underneath, what’s really being built is the means for positive disruption. The site’s name is the Oracle Construction and Engineering Innovation Lab, and it’s a first-of-its-kind project.

The lab is a live test-bed built for identifying inefficiencies and challenges in the construction industry, and tackling those challenges using a mix of emerging technologies. This is a big undertaking, one that Oracle knows can’t be done alone. Thus, the problem-solving technologies are provided from an array of different companies — HERE is excited to be part of this collaborative venture.

A true lab for testing and development, the facility is not limited to demonstrating static product solutions for Oracle’s customers. It’s a dynamic working space where partners come to collaborate with Oracle, identify frictions in processes, and bring the resulting ideas and their innovation roadmaps into reality in a functioning worksite.

Partners can come to the site and literally walk through the opportunities for advancement in the construction industry. Further, they can test those solutions and rapidly identify the areas where things can improve along side the factors that may have been missed in the planning phases. This is a crucial step in innovation development, since most construction sites don’t have time or budget for unanticipated errors.

HERE is a location intelligence company, and we’re bringing that power to the project. Alongside Oracle’s other partners like Bosch, DAQRI, Jovix and more, we’re creating a location data layer that rests above a construction site. Integrated into a cloud network, that location layer provides a real-time and historical view of all the tools, personnel, materials and processes that move and work in a jobsite.

This data-driven approach adds efficiency to the process of identifying the opportunities for improvement, automation and autonomy in a broad array of aspects. As an example, it’s easy to see how location data enables automated vehicles. But, we go deeper than that, well into the realm of supply-chain optimization to construction sites.

From outside the construction site (where materials and assets may be moving from their source to the job), to inside the site (where we can use precise location capabilities to look at movements of people, tools and assets), all of that movement can be tracked, collated, and made on-demand through the cloud-integrated location layer.

Oracle is putting their full weight behind this facility, and HERE is eager to work with them long with our industry peers to bring the full power of location data to the project. The autonomous future will not be the property of a single entity, and strategic alliances like those with Oracle will pave the way for real innovation.