1 CEO, Nadhi Information Technologies, 22 Venkatraman Street, T. Nagar, Chennai 600017. India;

Phone: +91 97910 41483; kalyanv@nadhi.in 2 CTO, Nadhi Information Technologies, 22 Venkatraman Street, T. Nagar, Chennai 600017. India;

Phone: +91 95000 08907; ravim@nadhi.in

TECHNOLOGY ENABLERS FOR

CONSTRUCTION INFORMATION SUPPLY

CHAIN MANAGEMENT

Kalyan Vaidyanathan1, Ravi S. Mundoli2

ABSTRACT

A unique characteristic of the construction industry is its fragmented nature. Multiple

stakeholders have to come together to deliver a project and share multiple types of data,

stored in multiple technology systems. Traditionally, technology solutions for

managing projects are typically sold to a single stakeholder. There are owner oriented

solutions, contractor oriented solutions etc. but very little to manage the complete

project data end-to-end. We propose a construction information supply chain solution

that brings all stakeholders into one platform and can help deliver projects efficiently.

The solution integrates all the stakeholders from a data and workflow perspective, while

taking into account confidentiality and intellectual property considerations. We

describe how such a solution has been deployed at a real estate project in India and the

value that the various stakeholders are realizing. Finally, we outline how such a solution

has to be an essential part of a lean operations strategy or BIM strategy for any

stakeholder looking to improve operational efficiency.

KEYWORDS

Lean Construction, Information Latency, Collaboration, Analytics, Mobile,

Interoperability, BIM, Construction Supply Chain Information Management

INTRODUCTION

Construction projects are characterized by the fragmented nature in which they are

organized and managed. This fragmentation is across 3 areas viz. stakeholders, data

and technology and poses certain unique challenges for efficient management of

projects, both from a process management as well as a technology perspective.

Any construction project, small or large, involves the coming together of several

stakeholders including the owner, design consultants, project management consultants

(PMC), general contractor, subcontractors, material suppliers, labour sub-contractors,

equipment suppliers etc. as a virtual construction supply chain (CSC) for the duration

of the project to deliver the project. Today, a typical mid-size real estate or

infrastructure construction project these days has anywhere from 40 to 50 stakeholders

from different companies that need to come together to deliver a project. That number

only gets bigger as the project grows in size, duration, and/or complexity.

From a data perspective, construction projects are also unique in the sense that each

project is unique. What unique in this instance means is that the information needed to

deliver the project has to be generated for every individual component of every

building, facility, pier, truss, etc. even if they may be very similar to other such elements

in the same project. Finally, from a technology perspective, more often than not, each

stakeholder has their own systems which are not integrated with each other (Bernstein

and Jones 2013). This results in data duplication (for example the contractor and owner

each maintains their own schedule), information latency (for example the owner’s

schedule updates typically “lags” behind the contractor’s), and errors (for example the

latest copy of a drawing is not readily available and the wrong version gets used).

Building Information Modelling (BIM) is the latest trend in managing information

in construction projects better. While the promise of BIM is attractive, there continue

to be challenges in BIM adoption globally. Quite often, “BIM compliant” ends up as a

synonym for 3D drawings and clash detection, which is a far cry from what BIM was

visualized to be by the pioneers in the field. The utopian goal of BIM is to effectively

and efficiently manage the information flow between various stakeholders for the

lifecycle of the project. This paper focuses on discussing the challenges of having so

much information, across disconnected systems, and the inefficiency and waste in the

current way of managing them. We discuss how a technology solution can address the

vital issue of efficient construction project information management and realize the

intent of BIM.

CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY CHARACTERISTICS

Construction is typically considered to be a laggard in technology adoption and

maturity even though there is a plethora of tools and technologies of varying degrees

of sophistication that is available and is in use by stakeholders. These range from

enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, scheduling solutions, document

management systems (DMS), computer aided design (CAD) tools, engineering analysis

tools, BIM authoring tools, mobile solutions etc. The implication is that the solution

landscape is as fragmented as the stakeholders landscape is (Figure 1).

The consequence of this fragmentation is that no single stakeholder has a complete

view of all the information needed to understand the issues in the project, of the lacunae

in execution, and of the process weaknesses in the project ecosystem that need to be

addressed to improve the efficiency of execution in the project. Project progress is

reviewed periodically using progress review meetings for which data from the various

systems are manually extracted and collated for review. This is a somewhat ad hoc and

reactive, and it is not unlikely that corrective action taken by management is often too

late to be of meaningful use to the site team.

According to a recent McGraw Hill SmartMarket report (Bernstein and Jones

2013), owners and contractors are demanding collaboration solutions within and across

organizations and are finding that not many effective solutions exist. Today’s

technology solutions are either owner driven solutions that cater to document

management, contract administration etc. or contractor driven solutions that manage

costs, labour, and materials. Since the same data is needed by owners, contractors,

PMCs and subcontractors, there is often quite a bit of data entry duplication into these

disconnected systems. In lean construction terms, this is a significant productivity loss

and information waste that construction project owners and contractors are not paying

attention to. Further, there is no learning mechanism built into project monitoring that

helps decision makers understand the weak links (either processes or stakeholders) in

their projects.

While technology limitations are one barrier to improved operational efficiency,

they are probably the easiest to resolve. There are organizational, contractual (legal),

and cultural barriers as well. The simple fact that each of the stakeholders belong to

different organizations with different economic incentives implies that they find it risky

to share information with others in the project electronically and that too on a real time

basis. There is also the issue of trust between all the stakeholders that prevents them

from sharing information proactively and transparently for fear of it being used against

them against when projects get delayed. The current typical business process is for the

project team to agree and sign on the protocol of communication at the beginning of

the project, usually for monitoring and reporting purposes.

Figure 1: Data, technology, and stakeholder fragmentation

The hypothesis of this paper is that in order to deliver projects efficiently, a new

generation of solutions are required that will allow for all project stakeholders to share

information into one central platform to proactively identify delays and cost overruns

and collectively plan to deliver projects efficiently. The paper will describe essential

characteristics of such a solution including interoperability, collaboration, mobility, and

analytics. Such a technology solution will sit at the fringe of organizations and has to

be treated as a “utility” that everyone has to pay to put data into and get data and

analyses from. Such solutions will likely be cloud based “on demand” solutions with

adequate safeguards to ensure that data of one stakeholder is not compromised to the

others. Such solutions can be adapted without extensive changes to existing contract

structures, business processes, and industry fragmentation. But it has to be mandated

so as to deliver projects efficiently without bias to people preferences and sunk

technology costs. Only then will there be end-to-end visibility of all the issues ailing

project delivery that can be collectively addressed to deliver projects efficiently.

The manufacturing industry, even the project based industries like engineer-to-

order (ETO) and aerospace and defense (A&D) have long realized the benefits of

information sharing, interoperable systems, collaboration, and of lean operations in

delivering orders (projects) efficiently (Vaidyanathan 2003, Dassault Systemes 2014).

An elaborate discussion on the similarity and differences between manufacturing and

construction is beyond the scope of this paper due to size limitations. And while it is

true that the context of the two industries are very different, the authors’ contention is

that in these (technologically) mature industries technology adoption does not end with

the implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, but rather begins

with it. On the foundation of the ERP systems, companies invest in supply chain

management systems (SCM) for integrated planning and supplier relationship

management systems (SRM) for collaboration to have end-to-end visibility of an order

from engineering through delivery (Vaidyanathan and O’Brien 2003, Succar 2009).

Manufacturers treat operational efficiency as a priority and are willing to implement

technology solutions to avoid data entry duplication, cut down on information latency,

and eliminate operational inefficiencies.

CONSTRUCTION SUPPLY CHAIN INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Academic research, industry surveys and the current literature on construction supply

chain management, lean construction, integrated project delivery, BIM etc. draw

attention to one point – the need for greater internal and external collaboration between

the various stakeholders in the construction project. They have also identified and

quantified the economic loss due to these inefficient exchanges of information

(Chapman 2005). The economic loss due to interoperability is estimated to be 3% of

construction spend for Owners and 1% of revenue for the other key stakeholders

(architects, general contractors and specialty subcontractors).

Information flow and technology interoperability is being researched by the lean

construction community and various systems and various solutions have been proposed

(Dave et al 2014, Sacks et al. 2010). A recent McGraw Hill SmartMarket report further

went on to identify that there is a lack of such technology solutions for construction

(Bernstein and Jones 2013). To quote,

Despite the advantages an ERP offers ..., in-depth interviews ... reveal that there

is no tool that allows them to share data both internally and externally. ... Better

tools are needed that allow more intensive data-sharing within and beyond

individual firms,...

But all of them still do not explicitly recognize and address the existence of multiple

systems (along with stakeholders). On the other hand, literature search on

interorganizational collaboration using ICT in construction have proposed social and

behaviour theories and paradigms. They have also discussed ways and means to drive

adoption (Adriannse 2010). But these do not fully address the technology and process

challenges involved in realizing the efficiencies in construction projects.

CSC INFORMATION EXCHANGE PLATFORM

The authors propose a technology based solution which is built on some fundamental

ideas and assumptions. One is that the fragmentation in the industry is here to stay and

cannot be wished away. The side effect of that is that every stakeholder will have

differing economic incentives that cannot easily be streamlined. The second idea is that

the data that each stakeholder has or is creating for a project strongly correlates to their

role in the project and consequently their data requirements. For instance, the data that

an ERP system, scheduling system, BIM model, or document management system

captures is different for different stakeholders (owner and contractor). In short the

technology fragmentation is also here to stay and is not going away.

In this environment, we propose a neutral technology platform (Figure 2) into which

all the stakeholders plug in for efficient collaboration. Each will share the data (that

they anyway have to share) and will receive data from others (that they anyway

expecting to receive). The technology platform is envisaged as a utility, much like the

internet or a mobile telephone service are.

Figure 2: CSC Information Exchange Platform

Intra and Inter Organization Collaboration

The platform is envisioned as a massively collaborative platform that allows for all the

all the stakeholders in the construction to have one version of truth on the project. For

instance, contractors will raise RFIs that will be closed by the consultants (or PMC etc.)

with the owner being aware of the communication as a subscriber. Consultants will

provide drawings that are sent to relevant contractors with PMC and owner being

subscribers. Materials, labor, and physical progress is put by various contractors and

suppliers with relevant MIS reports being auto-generated and distributed to all

concerned based on their business needs. All transactions are approved by the PMC

prior to it being used for billing. Financial progress is written back to various source

ERP systems of the vendors for financial reconciliation. The system proactively follows

up with all stakeholders for input and provides them with output as needed (see

analytics below). Plan deviations are notified to the planning engineer as detected for

them to take relevant corrective actions. Negative time impact due to delays in issues,

drawings, communication etc. is communicated to the planning engineer for re-

planning as needed so that the time impact of delays in decision making is contained.

The platform will complement in-house technology choices of individual stakeholders

and provide end-to-end visibility into project issues for all. With this level of dynamic

and real time collaboration, we envision that the schedule for the project is kept in

realistic and in dynamic equilibrium. Any surprises in cost and time kept to a bare

minimum, if at all. As one can envision, such a solution can be a technology enabler

for lean construction if it is practiced, but does not require the same.

Interoperability

The platform itself will provide interoperability with existing construction point

solutions. The proposed platform is also built with robust security features so that data

from one stakeholder is not shared with another unless authorized. In addition, it will

be easily configurable so that getting and putting data from various stakeholders in a

“new” project is not time consuming and is “plug and play”. The data entry duplication

that exists today is eliminated leading to massive productivity gains.

Intelligent Interlinking and Analytics

The transactional capabilities of the platform now captures all the information and

actions done by every stakeholder for the lifecycle of the project from design to

commissioning. The platform will also allow for data from the various processes and

stakeholders to be inter-connected. Since the platform is built for construction, it can

take advantage of the domain knowledge to suggest and infer these inter-connections

much like the same way social media solutions suggests connections and links based

on user profiles and usage patterns. Once these data level connections are established,

as discussed above, the platform will be able to monitor and proactively notify

individual stakeholders on the impact to them due to action or inaction by another.

This transactional data along with the inter-linking implies that the solution can

provide the basis for performing domain specific analytics. Analytics can be performed

as a process level (engineering, procurement etc.) or at a stakeholder level. Such

analytics can help proactively identify strong and weak processes (and stakeholders)

and provide lead indicators into project delays before it happens to enable decision

makers to take timely interventions.

Payment Models

One of the key considerations to the adoption of such a platform is the perceived cost

and benefits of the same. In the author’s experience, stakeholders place a heavy

emphasis on the implementation of ERP systems to give themselves tight financial

controls and are willing to spend for the same. But when it comes to collaboration,

schedule control, and performance analytics they are not willing to spend as much. The

stakeholders also are not too forthcoming to spend for inter-organizational

collaboration (yet).

In the proposed platform, the authors propose a technology solution that is

stakeholder neutral. That in itself is the strength of the solution. This ensures that the

technology ownership is distributed. Such a distributed ownership ensures that the trust

element (or lack of it) among stakeholders is not a barrier to adoption of the platform.

In this model, the authors propose that everyone pay for the usage of the solution.

As described above, the solution is to be treated like a common or shared utility. The

authors propose a payment model that is built using the guiding principles of IPD or

relational contracting with the fee for the technology platform being shared in

proportion to the risk taken by individual stakeholders. Alternatively, a simpler

payment model can be based on transactional basis. Each stakeholder can pay for the

number of transactions and the amount of data that is downloaded into their in-house

systems (but not for uploading data).

CASE STUDY

In this section, we discuss learnings from the experience of implementing a technology

platform such as the one described above at a commercial IT real estate project in

Chennai. The solution – nPulse – has been deployed at the Ramanujan IT City, Chennai,

India and is a development by Tata Realty and Infrastructure Ltd. (TRIL).

nPulse is a mobile enabled, analytics driven, cloud based, decision support platform

which combines all the key aspects of project execution such as schedule management,

design management, cost management, productivity control and risk management from

engineering through procurement and construction. nPulse also enables inter and intra-

organizational collaboration. The role based access control (RBAC) within nPulse

ensures that each stakeholder only sees or actions on data that is in their role and

responsibility.

STAKEHOLDERS AND THEIR ROLES

The solution is designed to bring all the project data into a single platform and ensure

that each stakeholder will update information based on their role and receive updates

(and reports) based on their requirements. The solution is also designed to encourage

massive collaboration by providing access to a wide variety of users who were then

made responsible for ownership and validity of their own “parts” of the data. In lean

construction terms, the data entry is de-centralized to the logical last planner.

Client: TRIL’s role is not so much as a provider of data/inputs (though that is not

excluded) as much as it is as a consumer of information and analyses, and as a

facilitator of smooth project execution. The client is therefore the recipient of key

alerts, reports and escalations which they use to take appropriate action. They can

also raise issues, respond to queries, and make any changes like budgets and rates

as the project might require. They have access to the all the functionality including

schedule, project issues, project documents, bill of quantities (BOQ) costs and

quantities and MIS reports.

PMC: The PMC is also given full access to the system, and they are responsible for

keeping the schedule up to date and the plan for future activities, for managing

issues and risks, for verifying and approving the schedule progress updates provided

by the contractor, and for coordinating between the consultants and contractor. The

PMC therefore is both a data provider as well as an information consumer who uses

the updates provided by the other stakeholders to evaluate progress and takes action

if it is warranted. The PMC can also raise RFIs, respond to queries etc. The PMC

manages the network links (between issues and schedule, documents, and schedule,

materials and labor and schedule, physical and financial progress by quantities in

the schedule etc.). The most important role for the PMC is to approve the data input

by all the other stakeholders (electronically) and orchestrate the information flow

across the stakeholders (electronically).

General Contractor & Subcontractors: Their role is (i) to provide daily progress

on the schedule (and the system infers the financial progress due to linked

quantities), (ii) to raise and track bills, (iii) to raise RFIs and other issues as and

when needed, and (iv) to provide updates on the documents and tasks assigned to

them. They have controlled access to issues, documents, and can only update

portions of the schedule that is contracted to them. For instance, the civil contractor

updates civil progress, the electrical contractor updates the electrical progress etc.

Updates can be done using mobile devices or through SMS texts. It is typically done

by the last planner or the execution in-charge and not centrally by the planning

engineer.

Consultants: Architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing and other

trade consultants who are usually off site can update drawings, respond to RFIs,

and answer queries in the system. The RBAC ensures that they are only updating

documents in their responsibility.

In this “loosely coupled yet federated” way, the entire ecosystem of stakeholders is

brought onto the technology platform. The solution ensures that physical progress is

written back into the scheduling systems, financial progress is written back into the

relevant ERP systems. Figure 3 shows a few data flows through the system as described

above. Figure 4 couple of sample system outputs.

Figure 3: Data flows through the system and stakeholders

BENEFITS

Having an integrated data model and a collaborative system that proactively notifies

stakeholders on their commitments and distributes MIS reports based on their

requirements is paying dividends for the project in multiple ways.

Since the alerts are “forward looking”, i.e. predict approaching date slippages and

pitfalls, stakeholders are able to take corrective action ahead of time to mitigate

delays.

The system auto-generates weekly work plans and also automatically reminds

stakeholders of their commitments on issues (and documents) to generate adequate

front for subsequent weeks (lookahead planning). These have resulted in shorter

turnaround for issues and tasks than when managed manually (Figure 3 and 4).

A lot of data entry duplication has been eliminated and the system is of value to all

the stakeholders. The transparency and centralized record keeping make it easy to

trace the “history” of various tasks and issues.

The analytics base has helped the project team understand weak and strong areas

and helped understand where the team has to focus to improve delivery (Figure 4).

All of the above is achieved without placing inordinate data entry burden on any one

of the stakeholders through nPulse’s “federated” data capture model, and also without

any data entry duplication, since everyone is connected to a single, cloud-based system.

The system has been in use for the past few months, but has reached its current stage

not without challenges. Some of them are technical like quality of data and others are

around user acceptance (or resistance). But once the team experienced the benefits (and

after the initial push from the owner), all the stakeholders are reaping the benefits.

Figure 4: Sample system outputs & analytics reports

DISCUSSION

Creating meaningful intra and inter organizational collaboration among CSC

stakeholders in construction has been the goal of much recent research in construction

business processes and technology. The objective of lean construction and the scoped

out potential of BIM is also similar. But unlike manufacturing, in construction,

technology solutions will work best if they are federated, ownership is distributed, and

neutral since as discussed earlier all stakeholders have their own systems (and business

needs) to reckon with.

In the past few years, the industry has grown to the extent that stakeholders are

comfortable sharing information in electronic media like email. For instance, drawings,

MIS reports etc. are sent across the CSC by email or shared in network drives. The

technology solution proposed here is a simple incremental step in that direction. The

authors feel that the proposed technology platform has minimal change management

on current business processes, contracting structure, and technology investments. The

additional capability envisioned is that the platform will read and write into the source

systems of each stakeholder so that the sharing of information is automatic and data

entry duplication is avoided. In fact, it augments the current technology investments in

an incremental way, providing the necessary integration, collaboration, and intelligence

to allow for projects to be delivered efficiency. We also believe that such a solution, if

created and adopted, has the potential to incrementally improve the trust among the

various stakeholders as well. And in that revised relationship, the adoption of lean

business processes and IPD contracting models will become much easier. The solution

will only work better if some or all of lean or IPD or BIM authoring tools are adopted.

As shown in the case study above, the solution has the potential to provide insights as

to areas to improve (legal, contractual, process etc.) to incrementally put them on a

better platform for operational efficiency. Consequently, the industry will get closer to

realizing the potential espoused by proponents of BIM.

Such a solution will be effective if it is done through the lifecycle of the project

from engineering, to procurement, and construction. We feel that such a solution has to

be mandated and driven as a requirement by owners given that they bear the cost of the

inefficiencies in the current business. The authors also feel that such a solution once

fully adopted has the potential to provide significant insights including realistic

schedules, costs, and deviations from benchmarks on those. In short, such a solution

will be able to assess performance of individual projects against average, median and

best in the industry leading to performance benchmarks. These benchmarks will be

quantifiable and data driven, replacing the current ad hoc, “gut feel” based qualitative

benchmarks. Finally, the solution will also have the capability to allow for individual

stakeholders to setup relationships at the supply chain level based on their individual

performances. This on the whole will raise the productivity, professionalism,

performance, and competitiveness of the industry and its stakeholders on the whole

gradually.

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