PwC to deploy drone army

PwC, the professional services firm, is joining the ranks of companies turning to drones and other new technologies to upgrade their business models.

The group’s Poland division began testing in April last year and is to launch commercial surveyor drones this week. It estimates that the market for drone use in construction and infrastructure alone is worth at least $45bn.

“The breadth of potential applications is so huge,” said Michal Mazur, partner at PwC’s drone-powered solutions division. The company has set up its global drone headquarters in Poland intending to take the principle worldwide.

The technology has been developed in Poland because it is the only country apart from South Africa to have fully developed regulations and laws permitting both unfettered commercial drone flights and flights that go beyond a visual line of sight.

Non-military drones have already begun to revolutionise industries such as agriculture and photography, and are making inroads into logistics and transport. But PwC says that commercialising drone usage in sectors from construction to insurance could lead to disruption in $125bn worth of traditional industries.

Drones are expected to replace humans who have previously been forced to climb ladders or dangle from ropes to assess everything from construction accuracy to wear and tear and damage liability.

They can be sent to hard-to-reach locations, such as oil rigs, offshore wind farms or gas pipelines. They can measure defects with far more accuracy than the naked eye. And they are cheap: the cost of a drone inspection of a wind turbine, for example, is roughly half the $1,500 cost of a human doing the same job.

“Monitoring infrastructure, managing construction sites, insurance assessments, structural checks. It is all about connecting drone abilities and attributes with business needs,” said Mr Mazur.

PwC’s drones, with their high-resolution cameras, sensors and geo-location devices, send images and data which are analysed to assess any structural defects or errors in construction, and external factors such as impacts on the building’s environment or the surrounding geography.

PwC acquired the drone assets in November, but declined to release financial details.

“We see real change happening in the business culture of CEE,” said Olga Grygier-Siddons, chief executive of PwC in central and eastern Europe. “For a long time, business success in our region has been based on cost competitiveness, but now there is a real desire on the part of our clients and colleagues to compete instead on value, created through innovation.”

Other countries are keen to promote and support drone technology as the devices become more business-friendly. Singapore boasts a number of companies testing their uses, such as serving food in restaurants and monitoring coastlines for oil slicks.

A trial in Thailand plans to test whether drones can be used to monitor solar farms to detect faulty panels.

(Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 2016)