Greater safety in projects, thanks to EGP and Builti’s digital platform
Greater safety in projects, thanks to EGP and Builti’s digital platform
Enel has collaborated with Builti, a startup that provides data-driven insights into a company’s structural and infrastructural risks that allows them to make decisions that improve the safety of their buildings.
Assessing structural and infrastructural risks as well as ensuring a safe manufacturing environment is key to the success of a company. Accidents in the production workplace can happen for many reasons and their results are often devastating. But thanks to innovative platforms providing companies with fast and reliable risk assessment, ensuring safety in the workplace is becoming an easier mandate.
According to the European Union statistics agency Eurostat, in 2020 fatal accidents at work in the EU decreased by 53 deaths compared to the previous year. Despite the increased use of risk management tools in recent years, the construction sector remains the most dangerous, with over one fifth of all fatal accidents happening on construction sites. The effect of climate change on civil infrastructure systems – including floods, droughts and rising sea levels – is also generating new risks that require innovative tools to manage them.
Platforms as a Service (PaaS) like FIBA®, provided by Builti, a fast-paced startup that provides companies with turnkey knowledge of their structural and infrastructural risks, are playing a significant role in increasing safety in the workplace. Now, through their partnership with Enel, they are scaling up and increasing their visibility.
Knowledge is power
The Italian-based startup Builti, founded in 2018, emerged as a result of the first-hand experiences of its co-founders Massimo Bava and Enzo Castellaneta. The idea of Builti came after the two businessmen noticed a fundamental problem in the risk assessment and asset management in the companies they were working in. “It was a natural approach to an important unsolved problem: How can we prioritize safety interventions on a wide, heterogeneous and structurally complex pool of existing assets without breaking the bank?” explains Castellaneta.
Builti is a PaaS provider that measures structural risk in an effective, specially tailored way so that asset managers can make immediate decisions for the best course of action to take. According to Castellaneta: “Builti responds to the needs of asset and safety managers in a concise, effective and fast way at a low cost.” He continues: “This allows managers to learn, prioritize and manage the structural risks of buildings and infrastructures in their functional, productive and daily use, by local stakeholders in a wider environmental context.”
Under the motto “Know to Act, Act to Know”, Builti develops ICT solutions that have been designed by academics to provide a faster and better level of civil engineering acknowledgment and applied safety to any analysis. “Builti, unlike almost all other competitors on the market, does not want to add specific vertical expertise in the world of structural engineering, but delivers horizontal innovative assessment modules for buildings and infrastructures to this sector through software involving independent professionals who are part of its network of constant research and innovation given by its authoritative Scientific Committee,” Castellaneta explains.
Sustainability through carbon footprint evaluation
Construction sites have some of the highest carbon footprints, as they often use and generate concrete. By providing knowledge of a building’s risks without having to tear it down to the ground and build it again, Builti is helping reduce carbon emissions and new soil consumption. All the maintenance tasks recommended by Builti will also have a carbon footprint evaluation, providing smarter methodologies and easier access to the ESGI (Environmental, Social and Governance Index) of the company.
Risk assessments using Builti’s FIBA® service solution can reduce the time and cost of periodic assessments up to 80% compared to conventional methods. So far, over 700 engineers have been trained to use Builti’s software across Italy and Egypt, and the startup is currently running trials in North America.
Enel Green Power and Builti: assessing structural seismic and static safety
The startup was first introduced to Enel Green Power, a global leader in energy generation from renewable resources, in 2019 when it was discovered that Builti’s FIBA®-RE.SIS.TO.® module fitted the Group’s needs in the evaluation of the seismic vulnerability of their buildings. “We decided to innovate in the evaluation of the seismic vulnerability of our buildings, so we approached Builti,” says Marco Sbardella, Head of Environment and Permitting at Enel Group.
“What won us over was Builti’s simplicity and the efficiency of their digital platform, which has a very solid technical foundation,” adds Sbardella. By providing a clear list of actions to manage the safety of our buildings, Builti has become a fundamental management tool for Enel’s large and complex pool of infrastructure.
In 2022, a wider assessment started on 1,800 bridges through the FIBA®-LGP® module, servicing more than 300 Operative Units over six areas across the whole Italian territory in just six months. “We have over 1,800 bridges under management, from small footbridges to road bridges. Some are shared with local administrations, so they also have important engineering works. They were built, on average, 70 years ago with the engineering criteria of the time – but they’re used today by today's heavier vehicles,” affirms Francesco Fornari, Head of Dams & Civil Infrastructures at Enel Green Power.
“We need to use them safely today, so the question was: how do we make an objective assessment in compliance with today's rules and in such a way as to then be able to direct resources where they are needed? Builti helped us to have an approach in which we mobilized our own forces but above all forces that were present on the market with a bridge assessment methodology - even in a surprising way, in my opinion,” Fornari concludes.
Builti innovation is scaling up with Enel Green Power
Thanks to its collaboration with Enel Green Power, Builti has been able to scale up very rapidly and to win innovation prizes. In 2019 and 2022, Builti’s projects with Enel won the SMAU Innovation Award, increasing the startup’s growth and visibility. “Builti is an example of integrated innovation, proposing a new model through a new product to manage a well-known need. The value we see is not only in the product itself but even in externalities generated through the network of technicians and engineers trained to use the platform. This approach allows us to guarantee the compliance of our product and acts as a catalyst for the adoption of the solution,” says Gioacchino Bellia, Head of Hydro, Marine & Geothermal at Enel Green Power.
“Enel is a unique company by design and represents Italian engineering at its best. Many of its buildings are works of art, architecture and engineering,” Castellaneta explains. “Being a sustainability-oriented and safety-oriented company, we’ve worked hand in hand with them to apply our methodology to their buildings and infrastructure,” he adds. Companies like Builti are playing a fundamental role in improving safety in the work environment, which is key to the success of companies like Enel due to its wide infrastructure. Builti has its eye to the future, with the mission to apply its methodologies internationally and build a structural risk management solution that provides customers with important data analysis and solutions around the world.
Risk management is one of the most important considerations for any company. We must ensure that the safety of our workers continues to be at the forefront of our processes and to do this, startups like Builti are creating solutions that respond to our needs in a fast, reliable and sustainable manner.