Digital funding boost for United Living

The firm’s subsidiary, United Living Infrastructure Services (ULIS), has received funding from Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) for its Digital Inspector project.

The project received just under £48,000 in funding, and is a collaboration with Cadent, Triton, TWI, and UK Research and Innovation. 

It is part of a larger scheme of digitisation across United Living’s construction activities. 

United Living confirmed that the project is in its ‘discovery phase.’

The firm is expecting to have a minimum viable product (MVP) by the third quarter of 2023. 

The complete programme rollout is expected in the fourth quarter of 2024.

Impact

For cost efficiency, the project aims to: 

• Reduce overall cost of constructing assets. 
• Streamline and track costs. 
• Enable real time quality and cost control. 
• Reduce project delays. 

Emission reduction goals include: 

• Lowering site power usage.
• Reducing diesel usage and, 
• construction reworking. 
• Lowering travel from grey fleet vehicles, material deliveries and goods. 
• Reducing paper usage and site waste. 

For its digitalisation efforts, the firm said that the project serves as an ‘innovation platform’ for the development of other interconnected field force enablement tools that are in development. 

For employees on-site, the project aims to: 

• Remove interfaces. 
• Reduce manual paperwork. 
• Allow employees to better focus on important tasks. 

At scale, this would provide United Living with fully functional industry 4.0 technology and the ability to scale into industry 5.0 over the next decade.

“The project demonstrates our innovative approach and is aligned with our vision to produce sustainable solutions for our customers and wider stakeholders,” said Benn Cottrell, managing director of energy at United Living Infrastructure Services. 

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