Rate My Professor Olli Seppänen

Olli Seppänen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Aalto University School of Engineering, with a field of expertise in operations management in construction. He received his Doctor of Science in Technology in construction management and economics from Helsinki University of Technology in 2009, with a thesis titled Empirical Research on the Success of Production Control in Building Construction Projects, and his Master of Science in Economics and Business Administration from Helsinki School of Economics in 2001. Before joining Aalto University, Seppänen held research, education, and development positions in construction economics and management, including six years in the United States. He co-founded companies Dynamic System Solutions LLC, Vico Software Inc., and DynaRoad Ltd, and worked at Graphisoft and Trimble Navigation Limited. He collaborated with construction firms such as Skanska, NCC, Hartela, SRV, Webcor, Turner Construction, and DPR Construction, and served as a visiting scholar at Stanford University from 2005 to 2006, lecturing annually at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.

Appointed Professor of Practice from 2015 to 2020 and Associate Professor from 2020 to 2025, Seppänen's research interests encompass lean construction, real-time production control, location-based management systems, prefabrication and modular construction, construction logistics, and digitalized construction operations leveraging IoT, robotic vision, and AI to enhance productivity by leaning processes, achieving situational awareness, and industrializing construction off-site. He coordinates the Vision 2030 consortium involving 13 Finnish construction and design companies, funding 2-3 research projects annually, and leads Business Finland-funded initiatives including iCONS for intelligent construction site monitoring, RECAP for reality capture using deep learning, and DiCtion for digitalizing workflows. Key publications include the co-authored textbook Location-Based Management System for Construction and recent articles such as Lean Construction 4.0: enhancing situational awareness for autonomous decision-making through digital visual management (2026), Automating on-site object inspection with a quadruped robot and BIM (2026), and Tolerance management in prefabrication of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing installations (2026). Seppänen received the DSc dissertation award in 2010 and has supervised award-winning papers and dissertations.