As is well known, the construction industry is a fragmented one, with supply chain comprising many companies and based in many different locations. Furthermore, in this era of globalization, the supply chain is no longer confined to within the country. The designers might be based in the United Kingdom, the project team in Dubai and the site itself is in Sudan. Therefore, how can all these people in the team communicate efficiently and promptly?
The answer lies in e-construction. E-construction is a method for sharing, exchanging and managing information produced or acquired during the life of a construction project electronically via the Internet. The framework for e-construction is the Project Collaboration environment, i.e. the software and systems that enable all project team members to work within a central project database.
The beauty of e-construction is that it is not limited to the international environment. With the widespread availability of the Internet and the ever decreasing price of computers, even companies carrying out local projects can benefit from this technology. A civil engineering company based in the UK, Edmund Nutall, recently won the Most Effective Use of IT in Construction Award recently by employing the digital data capture pen in producing reports on their highway maintenance works. The method not only contributed to their goal of achieving paperless office, it also resulted in financial savings to the company of nearly £40,000 a year by reducing the number of client inspections to 50%, reducing data entry times by six hours a day and reducing job-sheets filing by seven hours per week. Read more about it.
In Malaysia, e-construction was initiated by the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) in May 2000 with the vision to increase awareness, understanding and usage of IT applications in the construction industry - inclusive of electronic tender platform and Database Management Systems. The effort was undertaken in collaboration with MIMOS Berhad to develop an e-construction portal exchange where CIDB will function as Constructing Teams within the construction community while MIMOS Berhad will provide the technology and infrastructure for the Portal. The e-Construction Portal was launched in September 2000 with the aims of providing a seamless connection between Construction Industry Players, including contractors, developers, distributors, architects and manufacturers to conduct their daily business activities with efficiency and speed. Recently, it has introduced online tender advertisement.
Go to CIDB website
One of the challenges in deploying e-construction is in gaining acceptance by the end users. There are so many documents generated in the course of a construction project, it is almost impossible to believe that some of the processes can be converted to paperless. The key is in the method of implementing the new solution. In the case of Edward Nutall, the end users were true maintenance crews with rigid outlook. Therefore, any solution that is introduced should not be too alien to the existing culture or it may result in the system being underutilised or even worse, rejected.
Nowadays, there are many companies offering web based project management system. Check out these websites :
24sevenoffice
@task
eProject
CTSpace
Econstruction
Project Insight
Project.net
JGC Corporation
Teamwork
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4 comments:
sounds more like a virtual construction. :)
first we have to teach those typical chinese contractor about IT
We have to practice online project management, as our teams are placed in different countries. We use Wrike.com for it. It helps a great deal, so that we don’t actually feel the distance. We also share our tasks with our clients and let them see what we are working on at the moment.
ommph... who is eric? thank you for sharing the wrike.com thing.
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