Industry Talk: Talent and green technology top industry’s 2021 wish-list
Cris Dedigama, CEO, Middle East & Africa at Atkins, a member of the SNC-Lavalin Group.
“2020 has been a challenging year for countries and businesses around the world due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. However, at Atkins, a member of the SNC-Lavalin Group, we took this challenge as an opportunity to restructure our service delivery model and become more country-focused to meet our clients’ evolving needs. This flexible and dynamic structure is already generating positive outcomes that will drive more opportunities for business growth in 2021.
The UAE and KSA are two key markets where we will continue to cement and grow our presence in the business advisory, engineering and design, and program management services in cities and development, energy, transport, and infrastructure.
Leading industry change by playing an active role as a market integrator that leverages collaborative contracting models to enhance project delivery will be a key focus area for our business moving forward. Our digital expertise combined with technical skills and engineering capabilities is another key differentiator that will help us bring more value to our clients and deliver their projects more efficiently.
As the COVID-19 global pandemic continues to impact our communities and businesses, the engineering and construction industries need to be more flexible and agile in order to adapt to changing market dynamics. As such, we are transforming the way we work to deliver projects more efficiently and maintain the health and safety of our employees while we stay connected as a Group with our global and regional expertise.
Harnessing digital technologies and data to enable efficient project delivery and better decision making is a major trend that will continue to drive industry transformation in 2021. As an organisation, we’re investing in our digital capabilities and talents and working together across the globe to integrate digitalization in our design and program management services through the use of data ecosystem, digital twins, and other cutting-edge solutions.
With mega-projects currently being developed in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, supporting nationalisation programmes, and nurturing local capabilities will be key to building a strong collaboration between the public and private sectors and push Saudi’s economic diversification agenda. Therefore, we have launched a dedicated academy in our Riyadh office that provides Saudi talents with theoretical and practical expertise to build their engineering, design, and programme management skills.”
