A common European digital construction strategy

The European construction industry has moved closer to its vision of a common European digital construction strategy. For the first time, four organisations of major industries (CECE, Construction Products Europe, FIEC and EBC) got together on this topic at the highest political level and invited their respective members and other partners to attend a digital construction seminar on February 22, 2018 in Brussels, as part of the European Industry Day. With their approach on digitization, the sectors are contributing to the fine-tuning and concrete implementation of the European Industrial Policy Strategy.
The digital seminar was opened by Emil Karanikolov, Bulgarian Minister of Economy, the country currently holding the EU presidency. In his opening speech the Minister underlined that digital innovation was key for the European construction sector to remain competitive, a global leader and to achieve the EUs ambitious targets. In their discussion, the panel of experts and representatives of the industries made clear that the construction sector is ready to embrace digitization, whether it be Building Information Modeling (BIM), IoT, big data, drones, or autonomous driving. Especially in view of climate change commitments, the motto must simply be to do more with less.
One of the major challenges of the sectors will be to develop and standardize digital networking solutions to enable cooperative, safe and efficient collaboration of all decentralized parties on a construction site. The digital seminar was attended by more than 100 representatives from companies, organizations, politics and the press. The organizations announced that they would continue their path and create more opportunities to discuss these issues with the value chain representatives and the policy makers in Brussels.