Andrew Gaved begins a new series of features in partnership with Hilti, with a look at the quest for more productive jobsites – and customers.
When it comes to tools, manufacturer Hilti has always been proud of its reputation as an innovator. It spends an impressive 5% of its turnover on R&D and importantly, it exemplifies a mindset that stretches not just to making tools and accessories that maximise the productivity of the person that uses them, but ones which optimise the welfare of that person too.
But for Hilti there is a bigger mission in view, because it believes that there are significant productivity gains to be made beyond the individual operator – and significant carbon footprint reductions that can be made too.
The company is setting out to persuade specifiers that selection of the right tools can actually have a cumulative and far-reaching impact across a company. By making use of a suite of additional tools, Hilti is convinced that productivity both at the worksite itself and in the office can be improved – thus improving the cost base for the finance team too.
And whilst the manufacturer has historically been known best at the heavier end of construction, for those involved in an around building services Hilti believes there are particular advantages it can offer.
For M&E businesses and those fitting heating and cooling, with all its pipework and ductwork, and the drilling associated, the manufacturer points to no less than four areas where it can bring specific advantage:
- Many M&E applications require a large volume of repetitive tasks that will benefit from a productivity upgrade – and Hilti has a variety of product offerings, which range in sophistication from shot firing systems all the way up to robotic drill rigs;
- Much of the sector’s work takes place inside buildings, making Hilti’s high-performance cordless Nuron platform a compelling ‘no hot works’ option;
- These enclosed internal jobsites give rise to increased dust risks – an area to which Hilti has devoted much research attention;
- Many of these HVAC applications require work above shoulder-height, and here again the manufacturer believes its ergonomic technology offers distinct benefits.
But this only covers the benefits at the jobsite. Hilti believes that a key element of productivity is to look at what happens to the tools when they are not in use.
Beyond the jobsite
In recent years it has focused on the lifecycle of its equipment and the need for servicing, in the belief that only tools that perform at their optimum will provide optimum productivity for their operators – and the bosses of those operatives too. With the introduction of products and programmes such as Fleet Management and OnTrack! tracking technology which work in tandem with the tools’ onboard sensors and data gathering, Hilti can offer predictive maintenance and cradle-to-grave monitoring, along with more advanced reporting, such as highlighting patterns of poor or inefficient operation and maximising the effective availability of equipment.
By leveraging all this, Hilti believes it can vastly improve a company’s use of its tools and other assets – to the extent that it is confident it can cut the cost of tool lifetime ownership by anything between 30 and 70%.
But, thanks to some strategic acquisitions, the firm is thinking even bigger when it comes to optimising a customer’s processes. Firstly, it now provides bespoke enterprise software for larger companies, to improve a whole range of business systems. And secondly, by integrating digital design using BIM with its modular products, fixings, and firestop products, overlaying that with optimal use of tools, it believes it can transform the whole building installation process.
Slashing installation costs
What is remarkable is that by applying the full suite of products, programmes and assistance, Hilti claims a customer can cut as much as 50% from their installation costs.
According to GB Vice President Thibaud Lefebvre, this is no mere marketing hype: “We are effectively saying that ‘one plus one can equal three’. You can have a customer who is mainly using our tools and is using our installation calculator just to optimise. And optimising is super easy. But then you have the services you can use from Hilti or not and we’ll support you with design and engineering. And the last piece when it applies, it’s how do you connect the hardware with the service to the software? The software could be different elements: If it is a BIM project it could feature digital layout, or it could be enterprise software – but the key is how do you transfer the information from the office to the field and from the field to the office?”
He says that communication is a crucial element in the improvement process, which often means addressing human nature: “I’m still surprised to visit customers with 2000-5,000 employees in the UK who are managing assets manually with Excel-based whiteboards. It seems totally crazy from my perspective, but it’s a reality… Something else I observed in the UK is that people tend to work in silos more than in other organisations around the world, So they’re not talking together between different departments. Integrating the hardware, the services and the software, is just breaking silos – but in some cases people are still not quite ready to break their silos, it is all about change management.”
Sustainability
There is one further issue that is on the minds of many involved with buildings, whether developer or construction company, that Hilti is set on addressing – the carbon impact of the activities, material and equipment that have gone into the construction of the building.
Hilti has a plan to address carbon reduction on several fronts, taking in everything from the way that buildings are constructed to reducing emissions from the tools themselves, through to addressing the circularity of the equipment – the firm claims an average 24% proportion of recycled materials in its tools, which is three times the current industry average.
The recently launched Nuron platform extends the approach. For a start, it is forefronting battery power for a range of energy-efficient equipment that now extends to over 100 different tools – and in the case of the Nuron battery powered cutoff saw, it also eliminates the use of diesel fuel too, Secondly it is applying the Fleet Management approach to help improve its tools’ lifetime carbon footprints by more component reuse and recycling.
“Where we can have a big impact is by looking at the performance to weight ratio of the tool,” says Sustainability Manager Margaux Wibin, “So basically that means having a less heavy tool, which contains less material, and thus less carbon emissions linked to it. The Nuron platform is a great example – we now have a better performing tool than before, but on average it has lower carbon emissions linked to it – and we have proved this through the lifecycle assessment we do, where we are able to compare data to data.”
To demonstrate its credentials, Hilti has subjected its business to independent scrutiny from carbon benchmarker EcoVadis. The benchmarking across all activities has so far seen Hilti achieve Gold status, a rating it has retained for the third year in a row.
Hilti has made sustainability a key element of its approach, in the acknowledgement that the construction industry needs to be at the heart of addressing the carbon challenge.
Margaux has stark statistics to bear this out: “What we know is that 37% of global CO2 emissions are linked to construction; 50% of the global volume of raw materials are used in our industry and 30% of the waste – with 13% of waste being actually materials that are never used. So there are a number of challenges ahead of us.”
And she concludes, that for Hilti, there is a clear responsibility to lead the way: “If we are to meet the international commitment to reduce emissions from the Paris Agreement, we really need a reduction plan in place not only for Hilti, but for our customers and our industry.”
In future articles over the coming weeks, we will be looking at more detail at how advances are being made in productivity, sustainability, digital processes and in the tools themselves.
More on the products and services for M&E can be found here.
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