Linz, 27th–28th November 2019 – “People, Data, Business Models” was the title of this year’s technology forum, which was organized for the first time in the industrial city of Linz. The German Chamber of Commerce in Austria (DHK) and Fraunhofer Austria Research invited 20 speakers to a discussion focused in the issue of digitalization. ATP CEO Christoph M. Achammer was invited as one of the headline speakers and also as a participant in the podium discussion, “What does BIM mean in practice?”
In his contribution “Building in the Digital Age”, Achammer addressed the challenges that will face the construction industry in the future and sketched out how these could be mastered with the help of digitalization. According to ATP’s CEO, the building sector is lagging far behind other industries. This is principally due to the fact that many players in the industry still think in terms of projects rather than processes. “One of the biggest excuses that we hear this century is that the construction industry isn’t really an industry at all because it only ever produces prototypes.” But the opposite is the case: Industry 4.0 is the industrial production of prototypes. “If we pursue digitalization in all our processes and also lay the cultural foundations in society then we will be able to build highly individual buildings with a very high degree of productivity and an industrial quality of manufacturing.”
In the German-speaking Region, however, digital standardization is still in its infancy. For Achammer, this means that the development of a discipline and lifecycle-oriented, holistic data model is the key challenge for the future.
