- Anirudh Reddy, Founder-CEO, EinsiteOn the sidelines of CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) INFRANET 2019 'Roads & Highways: Imperative for Nation’s Growth,' Anirudh Reddy, Founder-CEO, Einsite, spoke on digitising project management. Einsite is a startup that is leveraging technologies like IoT and AI to transform the management of infrastructure projects. Reddy shares more...What has your experience been in highway construction? How did you find the need for digitalisation?I am fortunate to be from a construction family – Gayatri Projects, but my particular experience with highways is through the digital project and equipment management system that we built for the company. We are now also selling the product to other construction companies. And coming to the need for such a technology, I noticed that the fundamental problem in construction is that everything on-site is so chaotic that no one really knows where they stand until the end of the month. Hence, the thought that if we could use technology to shorten that feedback-loop and give people a real-time view of where they stand and what they should be doing, we could dramatically improve productivity and efficiency. That is how we decided to start building Einsite.What exactly do you mean by digital project and equipment management? Could you describe what that looks like?Of course! Continuing on what I was saying, we wanted to give everyone on site a real-time status of the project, which means that we cannot depend on manual data-entry at the end of the day. What we realised is that all meaningful work on site was being done by the material production plants and the heavy-machines, so we designed, built and deployed IoT smart devices that can plug directly into all these plants and machines to collect real-time location, utilisation as well as production data, all of which is transmitted to the cloud so that it was be shown to project staff on mobile or web apps. We are essentially putting the entire project on your smartphone, in the palm of your hand!Construction is known to be an industry that’s slow to change and adopt technology. How did you deal with that?The first year into our initiative we had a lot of challenges on the ground, but what we finally realised is that you cannot expect an already busy project manager to spent hours deciphering detailed data from an app. So we have put a lot of thought and effort into making the data as easily understandable and as actionable as possible. For example, instead of dumping all the machinery and plant data onto the project manager, we give them a simple visual that shows all the work done today, and if those tasks were done above (red) or below (green) budget.What’s next for you and Einsite? We are launching our IoT product under the name of ‘Equipon’, for which we are seeing a lot of interest from Indian contractors. We are also working on a new Computer-Vision and AI-based product that uses cameras on the machines to automatically calculate machine and operator productivity. We are conceiving this product out of our Silicon Valley office. Based on the feedback we have gotten in the US from industry folks as well as Stanford professors and PhDs, we seem to be at the forefront of digitisation in construction so we are planning to go global!(Communication by the management of the company)