Our discussions with concrete product manufacturers during the past month reveal that many are reassessing their workflows in response to the COVID-19 disruption. Smart managers see a break from normality as a good opportunity to rethink the old ways in order to emerge more productive. The first ...

Most of Idencia's customers are precast concrete manufacturers located in rural areas. Often, these companies are among the larger employers in their community. Today, many of the local businesses in rural communities have been severely disrupted by COVID-19. This week Idencia will be announcing an ...

In the spirit of this week's Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, I want to use this blog post to express our appreciation and do some giving of our own. We are enormously grateful for the opportunity to serve the construction market with our Connected Concrete® product tracking service. We're ...

This past week consumer apparel company, Ralph Lauren, announced that it is going to be 'digitizing' every product it manufactures. Why would a company with such well known brands (Polo, Club Monaco, Ralph Lauren Collection) go to the bother of ensuring that every product it manufactures has a ...

Amazon engages its vendors through a web interface it calls Vendor Central. Parties invited to become vendors register on the platform and their relationship with Amazon is managed on it. Why does Amazon operate in this way? Because it is the most cost-efficient way of doing business. All commerce ...

Advances in information technology over the past 30 years have created a foundation for improved manufacturing productivity that is often dubbed the Second Industrial Revolution. In the first revolution electricity was the underlying technology. But it was the application of this technology to a ...

There is a lot written about technology and the role it will play in improving the productivity of the construction process. But how will technology improve the efficiency of the construction product supply chain? This is the first in a series of posts dedicated to this topic and it draws from our ...

"Modular construction's time may have finally come." This is how McKinsey & Company summarized the findings of its June 2019 report Modular construction: From projects to products, a follow-up to its 2017 report about reinventing construction to produce $1.6 trillion of productivity ...

In our newsletter published this week, the article that received the most attention was titled 'Why Precast Should Pay Attention'. This was our title applied to an article that we circulated about a Cleveland, OH contractor's decision to offer integrated construction services. It obviously struck a ...