CTO
Infra.Market
India’s construction industry is entering its most accelerated phase of growth. India’s GDP for Q4FY25 surged to 7.4%, and as per data issued by the National Statistics Office, the construction sector led with a 9.4% annual growth. Further, the National Infrastructure Pipeline, public-private development, and a steady push toward urbanisation are raising both the pace and complexity of execution and with that comes shortened project cycles and sharper stakeholder expectations for large-scale delivery with precision.
Meeting this demand consistently is no longer a function of capacity alone. It depends on how tightly technology is embedded into operations across procurement, manufacturing, fulfilment, and post-sales management. This is where digital maturity takes shape.
Moving beyond silos and building in layers
In any large construction or building materials environment, different parts of the business evolve at varying speeds. Sales teams work in market-specific cycles, manufacturing schedules change based on regional demand, inventory conditions shift daily, and finance, operations, and planning must stay aligned.
Digital maturity ensures that alignment without forcing everything into one rigid system. What has worked is building modular plugging into each other, credit checks running automatically when an order is raised, and inventory availability reflecting across fulfilment systems without manual reconciliation. Any change on one end of the chain, be it product specs, site readiness, or payment terms, is absorbed into the system in near real-time. These tech integrations help to remove the lag between intent and action.
Responding to ground conditions
The need for this kind of system-wide clarity has increased with the pace of infrastructure and real estate expansion. Orders today are no longer static, with potential shifts in project timelines, tweaks in product combinations, and restructuring of payment schedules mid-cycle. If the underlying tech can’t adapt, every such change becomes an operational issue.
We’ve seen that frontline predictability improves significantly when systems reflect actual ground conditions. For example, delivery routing that adjusts based on warehouse-level stock, traffic data, and serviceability zones reduces pressure on fulfilment teams. Similarly, credit risk tools that learn from customer behaviour reduce the time taken to approve or reject transactions. These capabilities are not treated as add-ons but are part of the operating logic.
Tools that mirror the workflow
There is no point in building digital tools that aren’t usable at the edge. Whether it’s a dealer in a regional market or a project site manager working with limited connectivity, the tools must work where the action is.
For instance, on-field sales apps that give live product visibility, customer transaction history, fulfilment tracking in one place, and internal planning systems updating figures based on material movement. The common thread is usability, and teams don’t need to learn systems, but the systems learn how the teamswork.
That approach has helped us improve adoption rates across internal and external stakeholders. It has also reduced the dependency on manual coordination, which often slows down execution even when the intent is aligned.
From Data to Direction
Data on its own is not maturity, but what matters is what the system does with it. Over time, platforms have been developed to detect anomalies, recommend dispatch routing changes, and prompt escalation when needed. Each of these is designed around operational judgment, and our focus remains on flagging what to act on before delay becomes inevitable.
And because each system is built to work with others, new functionality can be added without reengineering the entire structure. That has allowed us to evolve without disruption, even as business lines have expanded across categories like concrete, wood, tiles, and paints.
Looking ahead, research has indicated that like many other industries, the construction materials sector is expected to mature toward a structured digital progression model, typically defined through levels such as fragmented, connected, integrated, smart, and optimised. These levels reflect how deeply digital systems are embedded into operations, and how consistently data is used to inform planning, coordination, and execution. Companies can benchmark their progress, identify gaps in system design or adoption, and prioritise capabilities that drive measurable efficiency by applying such a framework. More importantly, this structure enables alignment between digital investments and real-world impact, helping organisations evolve from isolated initiatives to organisation-wide maturity.
What digital maturity enables is consistency with orders moving with fewer exceptions, planning adjusting faster to new demand, and sales and operations aligning on what’s possible and when. It’s not the volume of tools that matters but the clarity they provide.In a sector where execution is complex by default, digital maturity gives teams the ability to focus on delivery instead of chasing updates. That is where technology makes the difference, not in how it looks but in how little friction it leaves behind.
Authored By Satya Kaliki, CTO, Infra.Market