Seattle just completed its SR 99 tunnel, a project that replaced the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel that runs under the city and offers substantially more protection to motorists against the effects of an earthquake. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) bills the ...

With The Precast Show 2019 in the books, we've taken stock of our conversations with producers and distilled what we've learned into a list of top-of-mind issues for the precast industry. We will present them in two posts separated categorically into the broad topics of productivity and technology. ...

In its 2017 report, Reinventing Construction: A Route to Higher Productivity, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that inefficiency costs the global construction industry over $1.6 trillion per year, primarily as a result of industry fragmentation. Diving a bit deeper, MGI further estimates ...

The movement toward 'smart cities' has developed momentum in the past few years as forward-looking city planners recognize that connected devices can provide value and create efficiency that was not possible previously. This will quickly become a driver for the construction of 'smart ...

IoT (the Internet-of-Things) has become a buzz-phrase that is thrown around a lot. It seems to be one of those phrases that is easy to shake off as a pipe dream offered by 20-something techies that will likely take decades to reach the floor of an infrastructure product manufacturing plant. ...

Late last year the National Precast Concrete Association released its 2018 Precast Industry Benchmarking Report, a report based on a survey of membership that describes the state of the industry and offers performance metrics for precast concrete manufacturers. This is a valuable resource for the ...

When I was taking driving lessons at school (way back when!), my teacher gave me some great advice: Don't just observe what the car in front of you is doing; watch the car in front of him. The same wisdom applies in business. Watch what your customer's customer wants in order to be able to ...

It is the new year, a time that we all take stock about what has been and think about the future. As we gave pause and reflected, a very clear (and, in hindsight, obvious) picture emerged: Before we know it, the manufacturing environment will experience the same relational shifts that we've seen ...

One of the most enjoyable elements of our work is that we get to visit precast plants. It is always enlightening to talk to the principals about how they manage their businesses and learn what they do to continually improve. Most often we hear about time- and cost-saving practices being applied to ...