Bringing smarter technology to jobsite monitoring, one cloud- linked sensor at a time

摘要

Frustrated by the state of sensor platforms for tracking jobsite conditions, Mark Bryant set out to build his own. He reasoned that anyone could cobble together some off-the-shelf sensors, but ingesting all that data and getting useful, actionable information was the real challenge to be overcome. As chief information officer at Edmonton, Alberta-based PCL Construction, Bryant has long been an advocate for bringing high technology to the jobsite. But construction has a reputation as a technology-adverse industry, and Microsoft engineers working on the Azure Digital Twins cloud-based analytics platform were initially skeptical of Bryant's proposal. The tech giant had sought other clients for its Internet of Things platform, but Bryant's ambitious plans intrigued them. "PCL's use case wasn't in our realm of thought, we weren't even thinking of construction. They thought of that themselves," recalls Julie Morin, solution lead and global black belt for IoT at Microsoft Canada. "They didn't fit the traditional mold of what we were looking for. [Bryant and his team] used the tech in ways Microsoft had never thought about and built something original-they really were pioneers."