New methods • Chapter summary
In a sector as rooted in the physical as real estate and construction, you might expect that digitalization would have a limited impact, and that the pandemic would have been catastrophic. You would be wrong, however, because the Kingdom’s ambitious contracting firms have used digital products and workflows to great effect and navigated through COVID-19 with their projects on track. International and local firms have shown leadership in their approach during a difficult year. As in other sectors, it is firms who modernized aggressively before the pandemic that survived it with the best results.
El-Seif, one of the Kingdom’s pre-eminent construction firms, which has built some of Saudi Arabia’s best-known projects such as Kingdom Tower in Riyadh, has invested heavily in digital technologies. El-Seif’s CEO, Ahmed Ibrahim Al Bassam described the firm’s experience to TBY in an interview: “We transitioned thousands of people to work remote overnight, cancelled all non-essential travel, and relied heavily on our sophisticated IT infrastructure to conduct a large portion of our business virtually. The investment in our digital systems over the years has truly paid off.”
Saudi Arabia’s largest construction projects are infused with futurism and are themselves a down payment on a future ruled by technology. NEOM, the planned city near the Kingdom’s Red Sea coast and the border with Egypt, is designed to attract new industries of the 4th industrial revolution. Fittingly, AECOM, an American contracting firm working on the design of the city, uses an arsenal of cutting-edge tools to visualize every element of the projects it undertakes.
The construction sector has also been the subject of significant reform in recent years. The Saudi Contracting Authority was recently established as part of a larger drive to formalize the sector. The government has worked to increase spending efficiency on projects, and the construction sector is a significant line item in the budget. The authority has enacted many initiatives to meet the Vision 2030 goals for the sector, including using a fully digital procurement system.
While the work of laying concrete and rebar will always have to be done in person, the past year has showed that contracting is far from traditional.