ict in building class content management, design and construction procurement. detailed description...
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ICT in BUILDING
Subject Reader
Class 3: Supply Chain Integration
Class Content
Class three sets out to introduce students to the ‘who is who’ in the building supply chain by
mapping out who the key players are (by profession) and how they relate to one another.
Students will gain an understanding about the fundamental differences between the building
industry and parallel industries such as Aerospace or Car Manufacture when it comes to the use
of ICT. As part of this exercise, key activities in those industries that are supported by ICT (such
as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)) will get
presented. The class will then touch on various tasks associated to processes in building that
nowadays depend heavily on ICT. Key drivers (e.g. business/legal/and procedural & policy) will
get discussed in the context of market analysis, project specification and briefing, (e)tendering,
project management, design and construction procurement.
Detailed Description
The number of stakeholders within the building industry’s supply chain has grown exponentially
over the past 100‐150 years. With an increase in numbers comes an increase in different
professions and the associated need to coordinate and exchange information across these
professions in a streamlined manner.
Information Integration across the supply chain is an approach that other industries, such as
aerospace, shipbuilding or the car industry have mastered with increasing success over the past
30 years.
In contrast to these others, supply chain integration within the construction industry is hampered
by a project by project focus where little knowledge is retained by teams once a project finishes
and new teams reassemble for the next endeavour. In addition to this problem, there exists a
silo‐mentality across the construction sector where different professions do not always engage
each other in an amicable way. Overlapping such professional differences with the different
design and delivery phases associated to building projects, one can detect operational islands
emerging where information gets lost and interoperability is inadequate.
Many of the issues faced about the disintegrated nature of the building industry are due to
cultural, legal and organisational issues. As much as technology cannot necessarily resolve these
issues, it can help to break down barriers and facilitate collaboration in a more streamlined
fashion. The advancement of ICT in building has brought benefits to individual stakeholders as
much as facilitating better exchange and management of data across the supply chain. In some
instances ICT use by individual stakeholders can also be a hindering factor when it comes to
Project Management and integration of information.
According to Li, Lu and Huang (2009), there exist five fundamentally problematic aspects of
contemporary Project Managemnet on construction projects:
1) using artificial tools and methods;
2) cannot try before build;
3) discontinuity in construction processes;
4) Ineffective information and knowledge management; and
5) creeping managerialism.
If tools and processes are not integrated and interoperable across various stakeholders, areas of
duplication of effort emerge. The resulting ‘waste’ has been one of the major drawbacks in project‐
based ICT implementation.
Research has shown that the approach required to maximise the efficiency of applying ICT across the
supply chain is to instill a sense of life‐cycle thinking. There various stakeholders do not merely
consider their own immediate information requirements, but they engage with the wider context of
planning, design, engineering, construction, handover, Faciliteis & Asset Management, and
demolition. Major cost benefits can be found for owner‐operators if they base their OPEX on well
formated datasets stemming from the CAPEX phase as 60‐75% of the total cost of ownership stems
from the operational phase.
Parallel development of PLM, ERP & BIM
• Little precedence about the PLM/ERP/BIM integration.
• Difficult alignment between BIM and ERP principles.
• ERP systems provide scalable solutions across an enterprise, whereas the construction
industry is highly project‐based
• In construction, most inter‐organisational stakeholders work on one‐off projects, using
disparate information‐systems & formats.
• The effort for implementing PLM and ERP solutions is difficult to justify in smaller or medium
sized organisations.
• Most likely beneficiaries are organisations with a large degree of off‐site pre‐fabrication,
such as volume builders and equipment manufacturers with a high level of standardised
components
Despite a number of similarities, investigations into the PLM to ERP transition has rather occurred in
parallel to (and not in conjunction with) the development of BIM over the past 3+ decades. Only
recently BIM has matured to a point where the construction industry starts to explore closer links
between BIM, PLM and ERP on a mainstream level. There are four main reasons for this delay:
Firstly: detailed coordination of virtual building objects for construction is fairly new to the AEC
industry (apart from a few exceptions) where subcontractors and trades only slowly start to
embrace BIM. A manufacturing mindset is not always prevailing in the construction industry that is
historically rooted in craft‐based skills and the experience of its workers.
Secondly: the construction industry needs to overcome the hurdle of setting up and adopting
protocols that enable interoperability and integrated data‐sharing across a number of stakeholders.
Thirdly: Software linking data from object‐oriented BIM assemblies directly to ERP systems has only
recently become mature and available to the mainstream construction market.
Fourthly: Many firms in the AEC industry are small or medium in size. Whereas BIM use has become
common in these firms, the effort to implement PLM or ERP systems across those firms may seem
too costly and undesirable
Still, many goals of BIM have strong overlap with the goals of both PLM and ERP. The application of
BIM on construction projects aims at streamlining the information flow across the building lifecycle
using high‐fidelity data associated to virtual building components that represent their physical
counterparts as closely as possible. Despite their traditionally different scope of service, there are
manifold possibilities for connecting product data from design and engineering between BIM to
PLM. Points of connection between BIM and PLM systems lie within the logic for the creation,
naming, tagging and management of object data (and the opportunities to interface this information
with other server‐based systems). BIM objects include category, type and attribute definitions and
parametric relations can be established to govern these definitions across the entire building
lifecycle.
Other industries such as car‐manufacturing or aerospace have long experienced the benefits of PLM
and ERP use within their associated manufacturing sectors. It is therefore no surprise that the first
steps for integrating BIM with PLM and further with ERP in construction were facilitated by software
environments that can also be found in parallel industries. Dassault Systèmes is a company that has
steadily expanded such environments from industries like Aerospace and Financial Services to
facilitate solutions within Architecture, Engineering and Construction. Their Logistics offering
includes equipment placing, human modelling & simulation, material handling and flow to the site,
cost & construction time estimation, just to name a few.
BIM execution plans for Supply chain managemnet
BIM Execution Plans (BEPs) have been in use globally since the early 2000s. They are often based on
exemplar templates such as those produced by the Computer Aided Construction Research Program
at the U.S. Penn State University in the early 2000s. The concept behind BEPs is to provide teams
with a baseline agreement about how and the extent to which BIM gets implemented on a project.
They form an essential component of the chain of support documents that assist the construction
industry in delivering lifecycle BIM. If EIRs are the prerequisite to declare what the client wants from
BIM, and in‐house BIM Standards determine the setup of BIM within individual organizations, the
BIM Execution Plan bridges between those two. It does so by aligning bottom‐up processes and
protocols stemming from the design and construction teams with the way information is going to be
shared with the client.
There exists no fixed format for BIM Execution Plans. Their format depends on geographical and
market context, building type, preferences by project team members, and a number of other
factors. BEPs vary in size, ranging from short 10‐page documents to plans with over 100 pages.
Despite their wide propagation, they often still require custom input to ensure their scope aligns
with specific project requirements. One way to do so is to split up BEPs that address BIM during
design from those that help orchestrate BIM efforts during construction. Based on the U.S.
Consensusdocs6 distinction between Design and Construction BIM Execution Plan.
Hickory Example
Challenges faced by Hickory on their path of embracing PLM and ERP relate to the fundamental
changes required on their path to gain benefits from an introduc‐tion of related systems to their
business. Whereas BIM is based on disruptive technology for the delivery of design documentation
and beyond, a transition to an ERP system affords the integration of highly disruptive technology to
all sec‐tors of their business.
Initiated by new leadership, Hickory recently expanded their competencies by employing new staff
with manufacturing background. In addition, external con‐sultants assist Hickory with a major
overhaul of their internal project delivery processes. The overhaul goes hand in hand with the
establishment of a new data‐management strategy that covers the integration of PLM with ERP and
BIM. The shift from a construction to a manufacture mindset gets manifested in a number of ways:
• A strong focus on frontloading the design effort in order to identify and vali‐date detailed
assembly requirements as early as possible
• Logical naming conventions that allow for fluent data transfer between PLM, BIM and ERP
• Knowledge engineering based on detailed analysis of prototypes and knowledge transfer
further down the supply‐chain
• A revised tool ecology with detailed specification of data‐transfer and management.
• Introducing detailed process plans with clearly defined hold‐points, complemented with
progress checklists and identification of high‐risk items.
• Consolidating separate information systems across the entire business into a centralised
system for data storage and management with particular focus on the integration between PLM, ERP
and BIM.
Key to the above activities is the establishment and assignment of authoritative (‘master’) data to
those processes where most of the information is required. This approach involves upfront planning
via PLM with the consequence that de‐sign changes can be traced and communicated directly to the
BOM for produc‐tion planning via their ERP (and in particular their Material Resource Planning –
MRP.
Reading References:
Duarte, D. L. & Snyder, N. T. 2006. Mastering Virtual Teams: Strategies, Tools, And Techniques
That Succeed, Jossey‐Bass Inc Pub.
Hannus, M., Blasco, M., Bourdeau, M., Böhms, M., Cooper, G., Garas, F., Hassan, T., Kazi, A.,
Leinonen, J. & Rezgui, Y. 2003. Construction Ict Roadmap. Roadcon Project Deliverable Report D,
52.
Roadcon (2003) Construction ICT Roadmap, IST‐2001‐37278 WP5 / D52
Li, H., Lu, W. & Huang, T. 2009b. Rethinking Project Management And Exploring Virtual Design
And Construction As A Potential Solution. Construction Management And Economics, 27, 363‐
371.
Hosseini, M.R., Chileshe, N., Zuo, J. and Baroudi, B. (2012) ‘Approaches for implementing ICT
technologies within construction industry’, Australasian Journal of Construction Economics and
Building, Conference Series, 1 (2) 1‐12
Vachara, P. & Derek, W. 2005. Factors Affecting Ict Diffusion. Engineering, Construction And
Architectural Management, 12, 21‐37.
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