构建建筑数据引擎-Qflow

Qflow’s digital data trail is cutting costs and reducing waste onconstruction sites Power, and major public construction projects, such asthe UK’s HS2 rail link, Qflow has now captured more than75,000 material and waste movements, resulting in anaverage savings of £221,000 per year per project, whileavoiding the equivalent of 9,690 tonnes of CO2 ingreenhouse gas emissions. ExecutiveSummary As an extraordinarily complex and diverse sector,the construction industry has been slow to digitise.One enduring problem is an over-reliance on a paper trailto track the deliveries of materials and the disposal ofwaste, leading to major gaps and deficiencies in the dataavailable to contractors and their customers. After expanding rapidly, even during weak years for theconstruction sector, Qflow is now serving more than 300construction sites. It is aiming to become profitable withintwo years, while continuing to grow the business both inits home UK market and abroad. Qflow is now expandinginto the US, Australia and continental Europe. To help construction projects improve quality controland reduce costs and greenhouse gas emissions, Qflow iscapturing digital data on the materials that arrive at, anddepart from, building sites. As many materials suppliersdon’t have sophisticated order management systems,Qflow decided the most straightforward approach wouldbe to task on-site staff to take a photograph of eachdelivery note and upload it to a cloud-based system tobe verified and analysed. Qflow is also advancing its quality control propositionso that its system will be able to ingest a client’s designspecifications and then automatically create a set ofquality rules that will govern when the Qflow systemsends them an alert. To support the circular economy,it is exploring how its data can inform “building-scalematerial passports” that will document what couldbe reused in future. At the same time, Qflow isdeveloping industry benchmarks that could help clientsassess performance and manage materials moreefficiently and effectively. Over the past seven years, Qflow has used machinelearning to continually improve the accuracy of thissystem to give its clients “a really rich, very detailed,picture of what was coming onto site and what was goingoff”. Adopted by major businesses, such as Scottish COPYRIGHT©2025 GSMA Building Council, and contributes roughly 40% ofthe waste that goes to landfill. As constructionmaterials criss-cross the world to be refined and thendeployed, the sector is also a major contributor togreenhouse gas emissions – representing 11% ofthe overall total. As well as helping to improve quality andreduce costs in construction, Qflow is delivering“sustainability by stealth” in a sector that consumesa major chunk of the world’s resources. When it comes to digitisation, the constructionsector is lagging behind many other industries.But there are good reasons for that. People, of course, need buildings, but there is scopeto significantly reduce the environmental impactof construction. “We started unpicking the factthat there is not only this colossal footprint, but ahuge portion of it is pure unnecessary waste justthrough mismanagement of materials,” says BrittanyHarris, noting contractors frequently must reorderor replace materials due to the errors that occurthrough largely manual processes. Firstly, every site is unique, meaning everyconstruction project is different. Secondly, buildingcontractors, and the suppliers they rely on, are highlyfragmented, diverse and dynamic – new supplychains form for each project depending on thelocation and the nature of the construction.Finally, in the highly competitive building industry,margins tend to be very low, leaving little headroomfor contractors to invest in digital solutions. It started with sustainabletimber Given these distinctive challenges, it can be difficultfor tech players to effectively meet the needs of theconstruction sector. Enter Brittany Harris and JadeCohen, who both have a background in the industryand understand the obstacles it faces. In 2018, theyco-founded Qflow to harness digital technologiesto forward their passion for making constructionmore sustainable. After brainstorming how to reduce this footprint withtheir contacts in the construction sector, BrittanyHarris and Jade Cohen were asked by London-baseddeveloper Canary Wharf to take a look at a particularchallenge it was facing. The developer had set somevery specific sustainability objectives for its WoodWharf development in London’s docklands - it wastrying to use only responsibly-sourced timber forthe new buildings. But Canary Wharf couldn’tdemonstrate it had achieved that goal withoutreliable information about its supplies. “When we first started looking at this, we lookedvery broadly and what we found was that materialsand waste was not only the most consistentlyproblematic, the most ubiquitous problem for theindustry, it also had the biggest, most unseenfootprint,” recalls Bri