Construction Technology - Integrated Digital Delivery - why we need to improve training

good morning everybody I've got three things I want to cover in my presentation first of all what is integrated digital delivery what does it mean for the industry what are the skills that we currently have and our current and experience and how does that play into the current industry and most importantly what are the challenges were facing going forward I think that we need to be very cognizant of one key issue and that is we don't have enough people in our industry to deliver the projects that we want to deliver and we've got to figure out how to attract more people into the industry and how to train more people to industry so that's a key message so first of all what is idd so idd is integrated digital delivery and you can see hair development from beam through VDC into IDT now these slides were presented by BCA in October last year idd is the integration between design manufacturing digital construction and asset management and there is a big challenge in those four domains they are four silos that don't collaborate easily or commonly so people working in design don't necessarily have experience of doing manufacturing and pre casting or prefabrication people in construction don't have experience of managing the delivery of prefabricated up systems so in order to cover come this we need to share experience some ongoing projects we need to share training from those projects and I have a suggestion for BCA that may be worth considering when you're looking at future provisions for contracts put something in for training and research and development as a requirement of the contract a provision so every time that money is spent in a project X has to be spent on research development training we do it for safety why can't we do it for skills development so when you talk about digital design you cover things like BIM you cover things like a mental reality virtual reality and we're getting pretty good at building 3d models so if you're working in consultants practice it's normal to operate in the 3d environment digital fabrication is crucial it's a much better environment to work in we find that our staff are much happier they are work in an enclosed environment with air conditioning sometimes some definitely ventilation they're not exposed to the weather elements and they've got safer environment operating so we want to do more prefabrication we want to do more manufacturing digital construction and we're looking at everything from RFID through to drones through augmented reality virtual reality and then it's asset delivery and management if you listen to other presentations we listen to other speakers there is a huge amount of money to be made in better management of your facilities but unfortunately people who design them never experience the operation of those facilities so we design problems into buildings we manufacture problems into buildings and the people that are running them don't tell us what we have to fix going forward so we need a better engagement between the actual building owners operators and the people who are designing and construction those facilities and the BCA have set out a very clear strategy and they're very broad so we have to develop capability we have to come up with better collaborative procedures we have to look at using platforms and common standards okay what's great about the BCA is presentation is the older cognizant of all the challenges so that you can see under each of these domains our key challenges not least - which are basically creating models in design phase which can be used for all the subsequent phases okay so I've come from the design industry and working in a construction industry there needs to be a better feedback loop and the one slide I like John from your presentation was the one of the Greeks and the Roman Empire and the guys laying bricks the one thing you'll notice in the Roman Empire was the architect and the owner we're standing in that picture giving instructions right that's not happening in modern construction so we need a much closer integration and that's why I like what happened in Changi and we like what some of the work we're doing in Malaysia we have co-located teams the design team the construction team are all operating in the same facility in the same building and sometimes in the same office space it's crucial that we actually have all the players at the coalface working together so very quickly technology construction you've seen this before this is a virtual animation of a project this was done to demonstrate a design anybody who's been involved in construction in the last 10 years we've seen this kind of pretty this is a demonstration of how BIM can be used for a construction this is a station we're building in Malaysia for the line to MRT project this is the architectural model so these models just demonstrate how much detail we can do with design this is design and build with contractors the contractor is actively involved in this process so we've got diaphragm walling for the main station box we've got C compiler walling for the temporary works or for the temporary add its permanent edits and you can see steel structures concrete structures these stations are very very complicated like you have here with the LTA this is the system inside the box this is the air conditioning system the life safety systems the drainage systems all of this has been designed in 3d and it's all being coordinated with the actual railway operation so we've actually got a full model of all the railway systems integrated into this process so the first thing we do with these models is coordination we make sure that all these things fit together and we make sure that they're actually gonna work when we actually get them on-site so there's a coordination there's a build ability build ability check and then what we're doing then is we're taking those models and we're using slightly more advanced technology this is a laser scan so we've gone out to the existing site so this new stations we built beside to existing stations and we've scanned the entire environment down to five millimeter accuracy and we've used that scan to create a reference model for the actual existing condition so the design model for the future is completely coordinated with the existing conditions so we can actually tie two things together the virtual environment and the real environment how many people here owns drone only one have you crashed into a tree yet never we've been flying drones for the last 18 months my son my son is four he thinks the drones are for flying into trees that's what he thinks cuz I don't so off my wife had to climb a tree to rescue my drone so they're not for flying into trees they're for surveying sites now we've always been told a picture speaks a thousand words well we're taking that to a whole new level this is a sequence of pictures taken by a drone 100 meters off the ground and you can see if anybody who's into photography these are very high-resolution pictures the lady box is myself of my colleague Nick Moorcock we fly the drone now we do this safely so there's always two people there's one operator for the drone and there's one person watching the drone so when you're flying with the technology you have to watch your iPad but what you've got a drone in a construction site you want to make sure he doesn't wipe out a crane or a building or something else so you have to have a spotter okay we always keep the drones inside the site and what we do is we take all those pictures we put them in a computer or we don't put them in a computer we put the SD card in computer and we process the pictures into a 3d model okay so this is a 3d photographic model and it is very very accurate so we could actually measure the length of a pile wall on the construction site now to put this in perspective a traditional survey this site would take a week with guys with boots on the ground and it would take them another week to process the information we can take the photographs in two hours and we can create the model in two hours so in the morning we can create a 3d environment of site and what we're doing is we're actually taking that site and we're putting it back to the design office and we're making sure that as we design the actual facility we're taking into effect what's happening on the actual construction site so when I design and build environment the use of drones for it very fast surveying can have an immediate effect on the design this is an under station chance Elaine same principles 3d models of everything but what I want to show you here is this is a traditional site series of photographs what we're doing here is we're using GIS anybody here using GIS geographical information systems this is an online platform so we're able to take these models put them online so you can get to this through a web browser so if you have the URL and you have Chrome or Internet browsers you can get to this web page and on this web page you can see the design model and you can also see the latest photographic model so I know two-week cycle were actually publishing that information it's a secure site so it's not public but it's published to all the project participants and you can look at the current site condition and you have a couple of boxes which allow you to turn on and off different things so you can actually look at the current site and you can actually then put in place the actual future construction so you can see where the site is today compared to the design model so in a second the operator is going to turn on the model so here you can see the future station actually supplanted into the to a photographic model now this is really really critical in order to get collaboration between a design team and a construction team using technology you have to make it this simple it has to be on a browser so anybody can use it on a mobile device it has to be quick and it has to be accessible so we're not just doing the stations or the buildings we're also doing all of the infrastructure around that so we can do the shafts we can do the ventilation buildings but we're also doing the tunneling so all of the tunnels have been modeled to great detail so you can see here the segment's you can see that hangers you can see the walkway what's what's interesting about this is that all of these systems are by other contractors so in to create this model we had to collaborate between our own consultants and the MRTS contractors and gather all the information or just build this model it looks quite simple but it took quite a while now one of the other things we're very proud of a commuter is the ability to use these models for our construction planning and our quantity takeoffs so what we've been doing is we've been taking the same models that designs are working on and we've been bringing them into a tool which is called cust X and it allows us to take quantities from those models so we can take floor finish areas war areas wall volumes concrete volumes and we can actually run up an entire schedule other quantities now this seems really really interesting but it becomes very very powerful as design progresses you can compare one stage of design to the next stage of design you can get a very quick estimate of a design based on these models in 60% design and then you can compare when you get to 90% design and so on and so forth but what we're looking at now is actually using these 5d models for actual progress on site monitoring the progress on site looking at the models looking at the photogrammetry doing the comparison what's being built what's left to be built and it gives us the ability to do forward cash planning so we're actually able to use the digital model aligned with the takeoffs and I aligned with progress insight and it gives us a very powerful monitoring tool now all of this is possible if you have a very robust IT infrastructure behind it and what we're doing on our projects is using the thing called a common data environment and this is a phrase that comes from the UK essentially it's a cloud-based collaboration platform so all of our information is actually based on a cloud server and all the information is distributed by the consultants on to this platform and it has to go through a series of gates of approval so it doesn't just get dumped into a folder like Dropbox it gets submitted to the system it goes through a workflow and once it's being checked and approved it gets shared with other people so in our case we've got information coming from Singapore Malaysia the Philippines and China or getting sent back to the head office and it is of a very very large scale we've got 3,600 models we've got something like 45,000 probably even more documents so it's very important that that information is secured and controlled so all the data that's on that you can see in the in the list essentially all the design information is shared on that platform so we have to have secure information we have to have access etcetera etcetera so we have all this technology but I would argue that that doesn't actually provide collaboration I will be the first to tell you BIM does not equal collaboration bim is possible as a way forward but unless you have a collaborative environment you're not going to get the value from BIM and I've been doing BIM since 2003 and I've yet to see a successful project I've seen projects come close I've seen huge value on projects I've never seen one that's got a five-star rating and when you look at the failures what happened on-site what happened in the design office it always boils back down to the former contract and in an in a design tender construct model you actually undermined the potential value of collaboration so it's very very welcoming to hear that you guys are looking at looking at NEC looking at forms of collaboration these are some of the comments I've heard from clients before I wish BIM was used earlier and I always say well that's fine but did you actually use a collaborative form of contract we use BIM with the results were than what we expected okay that's very common and then I said well what form of contract you using because you think BIM is going to give you collaboration and I say BIM will not give you collaboration I should go to form a contract letter now ironically I then say you have to make the deliverables contractual so we operate in an environment where people always go back to the contract so what I say is you need to make sure that the client is drive this from the first instance so you can see here in the documents that you will only get collaboration with client involvement and you can see the example from Changi if the declined steps back and basically thinks that the contract is gonna drive collaboration good luck see you see you at the other end okay any client who walks away and thinks that somebody else is gonna sort it out for them it's not gonna happen so when we work with clients we were very happy to work with the organizations like Changi like MRT like the LTA who are very involved very proactive they're the ones who get the success but we keep telling our clients that unless you're going to get involved you're not going to get success and you must have a clearly defined outcome so under the UK standard which is now becoming an ISO there must be them clearly defined employers information requirements what models are required what information is required from those models one of those models when we delivered what can those models be used for that all has to be laid out by the client at the beginning of the project not by the engineer when he's writing the contract for the contractor too late you're not gonna win okay it has to be led by the client and none of this works without early contractor involvement I am a huge believer in early contractor involvement the people who know how to build these things are not the architects they're not the engineers they have ideas they've got great designs but the only people to know how to do digital fabrication off-site manufacturing on-time delivery are the actual contractors if you don't have a contractor involved early in your project it's not gonna play out the way you think it's going to play out so if you have a design consultancy agreements make sure that includes very clearly written up requirements for contractual deliverables around babe and make sure that takes into account how it's going to be used for quantification for drawings for schedules and quantities so to wrap up here's the problem it's not just about the contracts it's not just about the asset access to technology we have a serious problem in our industry in that we don't train or develop enough people we don't bring people up we assume they have the skills and we throw them in the deep end I used to tell my friends when I started working this industry it was like being thrown into a swimming pool and as she went in they anchored you down with two concrete blocks and say see how quickly you can swim to the surface okay you we need to improve how we train people we're getting better at it we have a training academy we're putting people to the academy but it needs to be done far more systematically across the industry when you talk about BIM everybody gets caught up in things like computers and software and servers and IT and all this great stuff that's the technology which is 6% of the problem we've done the research we've done the numbers it's all about the staff ok BIM doesn't work and I shouldn't have people who know what they're doing and we don't have enough people the experience of these projects and we don't share enough lessons so we have to improve how we train our staff how we train our people and I'm not just talking about our firm I'm talking about the industry as a whole ok so it's very very important so when the project we're doing at the moment we're not talking about putting them in the classroom and talking to them okay we're talking about running workshops classroom sessions training experiences moving them between different job roles doing workshops doing online sharing getting people to make videos about what they're doing and sharing them with their colleagues doing QA education and training is not just about getting people in the room for two days and train them how to use a piece of software it's continual it requires many different approaches and we're looking at every one of those so we list down all the things that we're looking at so we're looking at project on boarding when someone comes on board what skills that they have what skills they need on the job support pairing people up someone who's got experience someone who doesn't have experience budding systems peer to peer sharing using online systems so we're now using Facebook would you believe in our company we have an internal corporate Facebook and on that system we're sharing videos clips knowledge so people that can't get to the classroom can see the information so it's critical that we rethink how we train and develop our people so I'm gonna leave you with three thoughts we all want to do things smarter faster better there's no question that we want to do a better job but their contracts prohibit that and when dr. Chun jong-hong says we behavior or mindset change at the moment our current contracts prevent that mindset change the technology the process the experience is all there we've all done it we've done this this hotel at the airport we've done the canopy's project we're doing the MRT but the people that work on those projects don't go out and share what they've learned there's no lessons learned those people just move on without sharing broader education so we need to look at how we train people and then the key point to this is that we've actually got to figure out how we get the same players to participate on multiple projects over many many years what we're doing is an industry we build something once and then we basically often create a different team to do the next project if we really want to unlock collaboration and technology we've gotta start taking five ten-year views how do we create long term partnerships long term collaborations so we can actually share that knowledge and has to be shared somehow so I know that's a really difficult one to do but unless we can start doing multi-year multi-term agreements we're really not going to get to a collaborative form of contracting and I'll leave you with my favorite catchphrase regardless of what we all discuss regardless of what contracts we have regardless of what technology we use it will get built the only question is how many lawyers will it take to finish the agreements that's it for me thank you all very much [Applause]