Oracle Industry Lab opens for business

Leaders and customers from the engineering and construction industry joined Oracle executives and experts at the Oracle Industry Lab’s grand opening event in Chicago.

Exploring innovative cross-industry experiences and participating in forward-thinking conversations, industry executives finally were able to see the 30,000-square-foot lab firsthand during the three-day event held in late April. They experimented with IoT, drones, virtual reality, and other technologies powered by Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband.

By embedding new technologies into hands-on, simulated industry settings, guests could experiment, learn, and experience the power of transformative technologies.

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“Many customers who attended the grand opening told us that the industry needed something like the lab to bring ideas to life,” says Frank Malangone, executive director, Industry Strategy and Innovation, Oracle Construction and Engineering.

A vision for the future

Discussions that began four years ago around how to try technologies in the physical world have matured into groundbreaking opportunities at the lab. Its mission now officially underway, the lab enables Oracle to effectively collaborate with customers and partners across industries. Initially a simulated construction site, the lab now is housed in a gleaming two-story facility that is designed to test and validate technologies to solve real-world problems.

“The Oracle Industry Lab gives us the ability to drive construction digitalization.”

—Frank Malangone, Executive Director, Industry Strategy and Innovation, Oracle Construction and Engineering

A large, robust ecosystem of companies are helping to solve many challenges, as the lab is built for collaboration to answer real-world problems with hands-on use cases.

“The Oracle Industry Lab gives us the ability to drive construction digitalization,” Malangone adds.

Cross-industry experiences spark innovation

Leaders from across industries face related issues and need technologies that enable their businesses to be more responsive and agile. The lab’s initial focus was on construction. The first facility simulated a construction jobsite with embedded technologies allowing organizations to field test solutions.

The lab has since expanded beyond construction and engineering to include manufacturing, energy and water, and communications. Providing in-person access to the lab helps partners innovate together, which ultimately improves their industries and the experience of their customers.

“From robot dogs to artificial intelligence and drones, we collaborate on transformative construction use cases,” says Burcin Kaplanoglu, vice president, Oracle Industry Lab. “At the lab, Oracle and partner technologies work together so customers can explore solutions to their toughest challenges.”

Some of the solutions showcased during the three-day grand opening event include:

Streamlined construction with digital twins: Through the use of VR goggles visitors were immersed in a digital twin of the lab and participated in a design review session. Any design issues were immediately captured and collected into Oracle Aconex for management. This showed how with a digital twin, a construction or utility company can react, predict, and control the physical objects in a more strategic and timely manner. The digital twin solution was connected to the cloud using 5G. Allowing for massive amounts of data to be quickly and easily processed. This demonstrates how complex, critical issues are discovered in virtual reality collaboratively and centralized for management. This is valuable throughout the many stages of a project—design, collaboration, construction, and finally maintenance and management.

Accelerated remote asset inspection: Digital jobsite reality capture technologies can increase in-the-field situational awareness and support decision-making. The remote capture technology —in this scenario including “Spot the Dog”—provides a view of up-to-the-minute measurements of the surrounding environment empowering smarter workflows and site planning.

Connected customer experiences: Among its many features, the lab includes a construction site; a smart apartment with a full kitchen, a washer and dryer; Tesla batteries, solar panels, and an EV charger. These replicated spaces where technology is used allows everyone to see how the customer’s customer—the end user—interacts with these integrated technologies in real life.

There also is a “Tiny Town,” a VR smart city scenario where residents participate in cloud gaming, and service providers deliver a positive customer experience with the assurance of their fiber networks. To put the network to the test, Tiny Town experiences a service outage resulting in a frustrating customer experience. The service outage is quickly identified through advanced root cause analysis and restored so the customer experiences minimum disruption. These experiences aim to demonstrate the “art of the possible” and deliver superior customer experiences by state-of-the-art assurance.

Excitement for the lab’s future

The lab is an idea that has evolved into a commercially viable solution to break down silos and create an environment where users can work across multiple industries, because there is so much to learn from one another. Innovation is a team sport; it doesn't happen in a vacuum; at its best, it happens through collaboration, Kaplanoglu says.

“With the facility outside of Chicago now open, we look forward to opening our other industry labs later this year in England and Australia,” Kaplanoglu says.

You are invited to schedule a visit with your team to take a tour and draw your own inspirations. And while it’s exciting to see the original vision finally come to fruition, the anticipation for what groundbreaking development comes next continues to evolve.

Andrew De La Torre, group vice president of technology, Oracle Communications, contributed to this story.

Oracle Construction and Engineering, the global leader in construction management software and project portfolio management solutions, helps you connect your teams, processes, and data across the project and asset lifecycle. Drive efficiency and control in project delivery with proven solutions for project controls, construction scheduling, BIM/CDE, and more.

Read more about the Oracle Industry Lab:

Showcasing the advantages of drones in data capture

Take a tour of the Oracle Industry Lab

Why AI and machine learning belong in the construction and engineering industry