Leading collaborative industry research from the land down under - Keith Hampson, SBE Australia

Sure, Don, thanks for that. I appreciate the informal format, and I thought that good value can be gained by having a chat and then I'd be delighted to take questions and make sure that there was, dare I say, crowd interaction. I think that's a very useful way to go. Look, I'm delighted to be here in Sweden, where I serve as a visiting professor for Chalmers University in Gothenburg, where I am now. It's very interesting, as I talked to some of the industry and academic leaders in this part of the world, how similar the challenges are in Australia compared to, for example, the Nordic region. But let me come to that soon. By way of history, I'm a civil engineer. I started my life in construction. I was very much looking towards a local government engineering career: water supply, sewage, roadworks, drainage. And after doing water supply, sewage, roadworks, drainage, I thought, 'Gee, there's got to be some other aspects of engineering that I would be able to get my mind around.' I was delighted to have an opportunity to be part of a major civil engineering initiative in Queensland at the time in building new port and harbor development at Fisherman Islands, which was transferring an upriver port facility to a downstream larger container vessel area using hydraulic dredging, new reclamation techniques, lots of planning and activities around the dredging and reclamation works, but building a new port from scratch: roadworks, drainage, sewage all made up those parts, of course, but on a grand scale on a large site. My responsibility was in the early stages looking after wharf construction, then roadworks, drainage, and buildings. It was terrific experience for a young engineer. Through that experience plus my earlier local government experience, I had 13 years experience in the industry in planning, design, construction management, but also of course contractor and day labor supervision. So I was really fortunate that over 13 years I had gained some good experience across a wide range of activity. Importantly, during that period I had the opportunity and the need to consult with universities on a range of challenges that we had in the workplace. I have to say my interface with them wasn't always in a project management context delivered on time, on budget, and within scope. So after those years in industry, I felt it was appropriate to further my academic qualifications and moved on to do a Master of Business Administration at QUT, Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, in the land down under, hence the title of my presentation today. In that role at QUT, I took on a part-time lecturer role in civil engineering and in construction management while I was completing my MBA. It was a great couple of years, and I was encouraged to stay. It's fair to say that I had no vision back when I started at QUT that I would be there for a quarter of a century in terms of lecturing undergraduate, building postgraduate programs, looking after overseas project management programs in various parts of Southeast Asia, and indeed going on to build a national research center with strong links internationally. I mentioned the Chalmers link here in Sweden. The beginnings of the center, Don, was really an acknowledgment in my career preparation for an academic career or an academic research career that I needed to complete a PhD. In that process, I was extraordinarily fortunate that QUT at the time were offering international scholarships, and I was very fortunate to be offered one of very few international scholarships and succeeded in becoming enrolled and convincing the powers that be that Stanford University in California was the appropriate place to go. It was like a door opening, can I say, with a bright ray of sunshine coming in around what I would call excellent industry-university relationships. I saw firsthand the relationships between Bechtel and other large construction companies, between design companies and the university. Those relationships and the free flow of students into industry and industry into university presentations was something that I hadn't seen at that scale and commitment before. In my mind, whilst I was doing the PhD program looking at innovation in infrastructure construction, I was also putting away ideas about how such a model could be instigated in Australia. After the years of completing my PhD, my PhD was looking at innovation processes in construction, particularly in highway bridge construction. I was able to examine and better understand the relationships between manufacturers of materials and equipment, the relationship between design firms, construction and asset management firms, and universities, but also with clients and industry associations like the Construction Industry Institute. All the while thinking, 'Gee, this is a good idea, this needs to be instituted in Australia.' So armed with a fresh PhD which looked at relationships and benefits of technology and what I called technology strategy, which was really in essence an approach to innovation in the industry, I marched back to Australia and tapped on the door of CSIRO. CSIRO is the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. For those in the US, you would think perhaps of NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology. A major national and well-funded research organization at the time were doing some terrific work, but there wasn't very close academic or university relationships. So in 1994, '95, and '96, I was able to build those relationships between my university in Australia and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, and we built a partnership we called the Construction Research Alliance. The Construction Research Alliance existed in a formal sense from 1996 through to 2001, so for five years we did construction research of an applied nature across the country with Queensland government and then New South Wales government and Victorian government. For those familiar with geography, you'll know that they're the eastern states, but for those not, you'll know that it's only part of Australia. So we were an East Coast research consultancy operating out of Queensland, also involving partners in universities in New South Wales and in Victoria, and in particular RMIT. RMIT have been our long-term research partners together with QUT since 1996. Through that period, I was very fortunate to work with leaders in research and also to build strong relationships between industry organizations like Lendlease, with Arup, and with governments of Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria, but also the Australian government. Those relationships were pivotal and it was an important progress to highlight the opportunity then to go on and feed into a national research funding mechanism called the Cooperative Research Centre Program, CRC. In 2000, with colleagues from CSIRO and RMIT in particular, we worked to build a successful bid for a CRC for Construction Innovation. So in 2000, we submitted a winning bid for the CRC for Construction Innovation. Core partners from 28 industry, government, and research organizations across the country, including QUT led in fact by Queensland University of Technology, supported very strongly by the Queensland government, including research partners in RMIT, University of Newcastle, Western Sydney University, and University of Sydney, but including the state government I've mentioned and major industry partners through design and construction firms. For almost 10 years, the CRC for Construction Innovation carried out around 100 funded industry research projects and delivered those with time, cost, and quality up the most in our delivery modus operandi, and ensured that our industry partners were at all times satisfied with the relationship. When the Commonwealth government funding, the Australian government funding, came to a close in 2009 as was scheduled, we were absolutely determined to continue the research relationships and the networks we call them innovation networks, to maintain the rage in terms of industry development, and to focus on three areas of industry issues. The three areas of industry issues reflect the triple bottom line approach to sustainability: in environment, in people, and in economic prosperity. Our research programs remain to this day structured in those three areas. In that sense, today in the Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre, which was formed in 2010 as the CRC for Construction Innovation came to a close, we structure our research program around environment, we call it Greening the Built Environment; around processes, research program two is around People, Processes, and Procurement; and productivity, the economic element, we call it People, Processes, and ensuring that those focus areas remain as strong today as they were back in 2001 as the CRC kicked off. We've been delighted that here we are in 2024, 15 years since we started the successor to the CRC, the Australian Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre, let's call it SBE or SBE Australia, remains strong, is growing, remains supported by the governments of Queensland, New South Wales, and Western Australia. We are headquartered at Curtin University in Perth in Western Australia and engage with the University of Queensland in Queensland, Western Sydney University in New South Wales, and still after our start back in 1996 with RMIT in the great state of Victoria. In that sense, I want to acknowledge my initially co-host or co-presenter today, Professor Ron Wakefield, head of school at RMIT, and he's unable to join us today for his enduring support over most of those years and the way in which we've built a collaborative research network across the country that continues strong today. So that's probably a long introduction, Don. I've covered a lot of ground, but I'm really welcoming if there was the ability to show that video, and that'll bring out some ideas around relationships and specifics around projects that I'm very happy to share with the audience today.

Excellent. Don, thank you. So guys, I'm delighted to talk through a couple of projects in those areas and to then call for questions that might arise from anything that you might have heard or thought about up to this point. Under the environment structured element of our research program, we're very much into sustainability of buildings, houses, and infrastructure. So we're looking at process improvement in the way that we go about the building process, but also in the analysis using digital processes for looking at materials, the carbon embodied in materials for example, in processes of construction, and in the operation and maintenance of the facilities themselves. We do this by using a supply chain approach and working with manufacturers, with builders, with asset owners, and ensuring that we get a whole-of-life approach to these issues rather than a spot in time, a slice in time. In that sense, we work across, for example, public housing agencies in Queensland and in Western Australia, looking at their stock of houses. For example, in Queensland, there are 70,000 homes across Queensland which are deemed to be social housing, and the opportunity to lower carbon in the operating sense but also in the introduction of new housing is being looked at in case studies as we move into '24 and '25. So that's an important underpinning of the environment theme of research. Under processes, the way in which we go about building, for example looking at lower carbon fuels for construction equipment, be it civil construction equipment like scrapers, dozers, and trucks, or vertical movement equipment like cranes. For example, we're looking at different fueling options including hydrogen and biofuels for lower carbon construction processes. And when we look at productivity, we're certainly very keen to ensure that as we seek to achieve lower carbon construction through materials, processes, or asset management, that we do that in a way that is productive and efficient through, as I mentioned, digital engineering, artificial intelligence, and using the vast array of materials that have been developed by industry, by the government, and in not a minimal way, the case studies that we've developed over the last few decades, the ability to learn from experiences that have come before us. So I think that the important part as we go forward is to continue the work in industry-government-research collaboration, driven by the challenges in environmental sustainability, particularly reduction of carbon, in ensuring that we have process and people involved in those changes, and ensuring that there's an economic driver to those changes to have the private sector partnering in the changes that are required for our project, for the state, for the nation, and can I say for the globe. So I'm thinking that that's an appropriate point to pause, Don, and welcome any questions about anything. Particularly I'd like to talk, if there's a question that leads me in that direction, around the relationship with industry and the importance of maintaining and building those long-term mutually supportive and respectful relationships. But over to you, Don.

No, it's a good question. I've lived and worked in the US and the UK and of course in Australia, but I've also traveled extensively over the past four decades. It's fair to say that each project, each location is different. I mean, if I go in Australia from Brisbane to Sydney, the context is different, and if I go from Melbourne to Perth, the context is different. So it's not, I should say, for each location whether it's a national difference like you suggest, say USA and Australia, there are significant differences. But I would say from my experience that we would see as much or more differences between different states within the US. In that sense, I'm a supporter of better understanding the context in which you're working in, regardless as to whether it has a USA address, an Australian address, or dare I say a Swedish address. There are differences across each site and across each sector of our industry, and clearly across different countries. Having said that, I'm not ducking the question. I mean, there are significant differences in my country, Australia, with the way in which we have grown up almost in a land of plenty with respect to the funding base for a large country with strong natural resources and the need to connect those diverse locations with road and rail and telecommunications. So there's a strong economy and there is a strong construction industry that supports the nation, as there is in the US, as there is in the UK, as there is in Europe. But I think one of the things that I note about the Australian situation versus say a United States situation is probably the level of union engagement of the construction workers. Clearly in different states of the US and in different employer groups, there are union states with strong union involvement across, for example, transport workers or construction workers. Whereas it's probably fair to say that in Australia that's a reasonably uniform strength of unions around the country. Through that, the construction labor costs are quite high by comparison with what we may see in some of the states of the US for example. That probably is consistent as well in terms of the high labor costs that we would see say in the Nordic region where I am now. But I think that drives things like high motivation towards automation and robotics. I mean robotics not in robotics in process improvement, so higher focus on automation and robotics, a stronger focus on probably, it's fair to say, workplace health and safety. It's important probably in our context to note the really strong growth of health and safety work that RMIT have taken on over the past two decades from the early CRC for Construction Innovation days, but also around the process management, the project management processes. I think are very strong in Australia and in the Nordic region where labor costs are high and the ability or the drive to actually maintain productivity because of the high labor costs and because of the high expectations in terms of quality and productivity, it really does drive a slightly different approach to the way in which plant and equipment is utilized in terms of the balance with the human labor component. Certainly I have noted that on construction sites in the US. I was walking past a construction site here in Gothenburg earlier today, same site yesterday, and the same site the day before, and I can't help but note the high quality of absolute modern pristine equipment in concrete pumping equipment, the way in which communication is used around site, the way the equipment is utilized in a safe and efficient way respectful of health and safety because of the cost of labor. So I think there's an element of that in the mix. But again, I want to highlight that different sites across the same state and the same country will also provide contrasts that are not too dissimilar to that that I've just described when making a generalized comment about the US and Australia.

Yeah, this is on everybody's lips, of course. In this country as well as other global markets, there's a great shortage of housing. So the Australian government has a great target, an ambitious target of 1.2 million homes to be delivered over the next five years, and a large part of that for social housing. So with our strong rates of immigration and our slow rates of new housing supply and the growth of smaller households, those factors in the main have pushed up the demand for housing. So prefabrication, offsite manufacture, is certainly being, or interest in that is certainly being reinvigorated. This is not new, Don, as you know. This has been a topic for discussion for some decades, but it's my belief that the pressures that we have, and certainly I'm understanding some of the pressures around other countries, are driving the interest and adoption of prefabrication, offsite manufacture to a much more heightened level that it's now becoming more understood that there is a must-do rather than seeing it as an option. So the question for me in this sense relies on an understanding of the intricacies of the changes in processes that are required. In other words, let's assume that we're talking about wall units or floor units or roof trusses, those modularized components rather than volumetric prefabrication, for example in lifting a house onto a slab. I think have got much more opportunity of providing solutions for the challenges of housing in our country, for example in Australia, than volumetric prefab incomplete units for example. But what that means is that the elements of the equipment and machinery on site and the repeatability of being able to get economies of scale in the factory in making the wall or floor or roof truss components needs to provide for a scale of production that brings economies to the table with respect to the components. But then on site, we'll need to be looking towards project management processes to bring it all together in an effective way, because if they're delivered in the wrong order or we don't have the right cranage equipment on site or we're building on the side of a hill in an infill site, some of those idealized efficiencies may not be realized. The skills and equipment required in that onsite activity is sometimes different and sometimes very different to the way that we've traditionally piece-built homes for example in this country. So I guess what I'm agreeing is that there is a drive towards prefabrication, offsite manufacture, industrialized manufacture, but I do believe that the supply chain evaluation of how these economies and, I say, the quality and safety and repeatability of those need to be also carefully considered as a package if we're to get the economies that we're dreaming about. Part of that, particularly in a social housing sense, will require the adoption of scale housing. In other words, housing that might be in modules of or program deliveries of 10 or 20 or 100 or 200, not three or four in this postcode or four or five in that postcode. We'll need to look very carefully that if we're going to realize those efficiencies, there's a client and a customer relationship that needs to be revisited in terms of the uniqueness of the dwelling for example in the housing space.

Now, terrific. I'd be delighted to. My first refereed paper was at the International Symposium for Automation and Robotics in Construction, ISARC, in Texas in 1996. Goodness. So I'm delighted to say that I've had an interest in this my entire career. In Australia, the prominent form of housing, particularly on the East Coast where the majority of the population live, is timber construction. So when we look at the modularization of timber components that make up housing, for example, the roof truss industry and the wall frame industry and the floor cassette industry is moving towards robotized construction. Now, robot, I dislike the word robots to be honest, but automation in the assembly processes where the units of timber are pre-cut at all of the right angles and lengths, where they're assembled together and the metal clasp processes are applied, and those processes are largely automated in floors, walls, and roof trusses. This area, I mentioned a few moments ago, is going to need to be fine-tuned if we're to meet some of the large housing expectations of the community that the government is targeting. But in other areas, if we look towards the West Coast of Australia, just highlighting the differences that I was noting before about the US and Australia, the West Coast of Australia centered in Western Australia and particularly around the southern part of Western Australia in Perth is very much a bricks, blocks, masonry construction. And again, labor costs are driving automation and robotics in bricklaying technology, for example, machines that can lay bricks. But importantly, I mentioned before about the need to evaluate processes. Firms like one of our partners, BGC Australia, are building blocks that slide together, that fit together using glue or sealant rather than mortar, and are able to be made in a lightweight material so that where there is human labor, the productivity in square meters of wall per person per hour is significantly improved. So those sorts of automation and robotics, supported by different material characteristics, are certainly making a big difference in the way that homes are being built. If we look towards infrastructure, for example, robotized automated rail laying devices, for road, for rail equipment around asphalt and base course and top course for infrastructure, and of course the laying equipment for asphalt laying and line marking and defect notification, for example. We work with the main roads agencies around the country using or interpreting video technology or video recordings made by rapidly moving trucks and able to interpret from that the validity or the integrity of the white line that aids as the definition of the roadway for the lane detection equipment on modern vehicles. So those technologies around automatic sensing and interpretation of data to be able at a strategic level to provide network requirements for modern road users in the infrastructure space are also good examples of what could be broadly called automation in the industry. So certainly it's well advanced. Our universities around the country are well into artificial intelligence and machine learning, and certainly around the interpretation of the adaptation of that into labor-saving devices that aid in housing, buildings, and infrastructure construction. I might say, sorry, just to add there, there's an international component as well to this. So our partnerships with countries around the world, the US, Nordic regions in Europe, they're well advanced in providing equipment into bricks, blocks, and concrete, into timber frame construction, into the automation and digitization of design, construction scheduling, and asset management. These are all very rarely national efforts, they're very much international efforts, and I think that's the way that we're going to get economies of scale and leading technological advance in amongst all of that.

So is there, let's just say the roof frame truss machinery for example. Part of the answer to your question could be around the implementation elements, for example the skilling of the workforce around the digitization of processes or the digital machine learning I talked about a moment ago. But also the ability for us as an industry to have within our sector individuals who are literate in machine learning software and the ability to actually adapt that to specific contexts, I think is important. So universities or places of learning, I should say, even into the trade training, are already picking up the digital stream of skill development required. But I think that we're going to need more of that as we go forward. So the skill sets, the way in which our factories and labor processes work, and I mention in the Australian context there's a strong union context around workers that are factory-based versus those that are site-based. So there's some negotiations required around those elements of where the workers are covered. But also, as we move into, I mentioned before, the implementation or the integration of those elements on a site basis need to be carefully planned and carefully integrated amongst all the other consolidated prefab site components to get the efficiencies that we dream of. So hopefully, I'm very happy to talk offline about some of this, Zui, if you feel that that's valuable to you.

Don, thank you for that. Thanks for the lead. You're following up on the lead. I think at the center of the success that our centre has enjoyed over the past two and a half decades has been the pervading long-term relationship building that we've built with every project. If you listen to some industry people who are in positions of, let's say, in yesterday's parlance, writing the checks, those that have financial responsibility, those that have been burnt by researchers saying, 'Look, we're looking for funding for a project that's going to last the next three years, we need this amount of funding, and we're going to use government funding of this much to bid for a project,' and then the industry people never see them again. I hear that story almost every week. When we build a relationship, we will often build the relationship with an industry person in a sense where they can look and see under the bonnet of what it is that we're doing without a financial commitment in the initial period. And then after that, we'll say, 'Well look, if you'd like to put in X dollars, usually this much, we'll let you have a case study or we'll fund a case study for you. And if you like that, we'll do a case study this big. And then if you see value in that, we would expect you to consider being a member of the centre, which involves a more significant financial commitment.' So there's a gradual building of trust and, in a sense, a building of a personal relationship. I'm really pleased to say that when we built the CRC for Construction Innovation and even before that the Construction Research Alliance with CSIRO back in the late '90s, we've still got people today working on our projects that were with us in the late '90s and into the 2000s, two and a half decades later, because they can see value in the relationship not just built around the project but around being able to pick up the phone or tap out an email or send a WhatsApp message and say, 'Who do you know in this part of the world doing this sort of work?' or 'Do you know of a material in this space that gives me these qualities that I'm looking for?' So we tend to over time serve as a trusted consultant for industry people who aren't looking for a sales pitch but they're looking to deal with people who are genuinely concerned about the long-term future of industry and industry development. So in that sense, it sounds hackneyed, but the trusted partner is very much the model that I think we've been able to deliver over a few decades. It's fair to say that our centre continues to grow progressively, and it's the relationships that continue those partnerships that make it work. So yes, there are many hours spent that are not, if you like, in consultant parlance, billable hours, but in the long term they do provide the bread and butter that keeps the centre active, engaged, and influential. So it's a model of success, I think, that is really important, built on personal relationships.

Indeed. And for the CIB generally, Don, I wanted to finish off by saying, as I mentioned in the video that you showed at the beginning of this, it's without a doubt the CIB has been the single most important networking entity that has helped me and my colleagues in Australia connect to the rest of the world. There is no doubt about that, and it continues to do that. I'm looking forward to meeting you in Brussels next week for a CIB board meeting, and there will be new networks developed and new value adds that aren't actually realized till sometime later next week or next year. I'll say I met a person in Buildwise in Belgium who was a colleague of our Belgium Buildwise CIB representative, and that person mentioned X or Y, 'Wouldn't it be good to drop them an email to follow up?' In respect of the Early Career Researcher Award that I've been delighted to sponsor, I'm looking to encourage individuals who are early career researchers to really think about engagement with industry as a valuable activity that will enhance their career but also importantly enhance the industry in which they're serving. Building industry relationships where the award is able to assist with that, in building projects, in providing some funding for data collection and engagement in interviewing or measuring or building personal relationships in a broad sense, is very much encouraged as part of the submission process. And I welcome, you're right Don, any applications between now and the 14th of October, which is just 10 days' time. So yeah, I'm passionate about industry research relationships, and if I can in some way encourage that through this award, I've been very pleased to do so through the CIB.

Thank you. Thanks guys. Thank you Don and thank you everybody.