Being an inevitable process, digitalization is increasingly penetrating various spheres of our life, including the way of working and daily organization. This process ensures achieving higher productivity, facilitates and expedites the process of analysis and contributes to better and quicker decision making. Despite the fact that it has been a topic of discussion for some time, digitalization remains abstract and unfamiliar to many companies, even entire economic activities. Encouraging digitalization is more than necessary, however, even more important is the proper understanding of the benefits from digitalization for a specific process, the expenses, and whether the later exceeds the benefits.
As one of the least digitalized industries, construction is facing rising challenges in catching up to other industries that adopted the digitalization processes earlier and had more time to adapt. According to a digital readiness and maturity study conducted for Makedonski Telekom, only 8% of the total number of digitally mature companies in 2022 originated from the construction sector. Uncertainty and unpredictability are the major reasons the construction is lagging behind all other sectors, apart from agriculture and fishery, which rank the lowest.
Following the concept “Chamber of the Future and Your Consultant in Business”, the Economic Chamber of North Macedonia is leading several initiatives to support introduction of new technologies that promote the business process, increase the efficiency and productivity, and create value added, including the construction sector and the building materials industry, through activities under the projects “Sustainable EnErgy Skills in construction: Visible, Validated, Valuable” (SEEtheSkills) and “Digital transformation is making its way to businesses – development of key performance indicators to increase sector productivity” (DIG-IN-KPI).
The DIG-IN-KPI project, which apart from the Economic Chamber of North Macedonia also includes the chambers of commerce of Slovenia and Croatia, will develop indicators at trilateral level that will measure the extent and level of digitalization of construction companies, aiming at stimulating digital transformation in the construction sector in line with the Construction 4.0 technology trends. 
Through the project, chambers will directly address construction companies to define key performance indicators (KPI), as well as while creating a digitalization level self-assessment tool for the construction industry.
These indicators will provide a clearer idea of what digitalization in the construction sector entails, we will determine the digitalization level of construction companies from Macedonia, Croatia, and Slovenia, and we will define a digital transformation roadmap for the companies.
Stage one of the project will generate key performance indicators that will describe the processes and determine the digitalization levels of each process. Stage two will include company self-evaluation of their digitalization level by filling in an online questionnaire, while the final stage will involve processing of the data, creating a report on the digitalization level of construction companies and presenting the findings to companies from the sector.
”Digital transformation is making its way to businesses – development of key performance indicators to increase sector productivity” (DIG-IN-KPI) project is funded by the European Union through the Slovene National Agency (CMEPIUS), and it will serve as model project to define digitalization indicators in the European Construction Industry Federation (FIEC).