Author: Louis Tay CS, COO of PLYTEC Group
TAM Council Member (Building & Construction TEP) MPC IPS & PSPN IKG Lead on BIM Adoption
Malaysia Productivity Report year 2020, once again puts the construction sector on the top of the least productive economic sector at RM45,293 in term of value add per employment, more than 50% below the national.
Other than the adoption of CAD technology which digitized design content in construction. The work methodologies and processes across entire project life cycle remain very much at the same level of efficiency compared to 30 years ago; characterized with fragmented and isolated work processes, ineffective communication, opaqueness and informal practices. Most of the other industries especially the finance and banking sectors, over the same period have drastically evolved and adopted automated work processes and collaboration based on real-time, centralized & platform-independent accessible data (information) management system.
A preferred design workflow is to achieve more than 95% of design details developed and coordinated at pre-construction stage. If both the work content and the work processes are digitalized based on single source of truth (SST) digital information management system (IMS); real-time and collective collaboration framework can be established on project with common data environment (CDE); constructible information can be created at design stage and adopted seamlessly into subsequent project phases including procurement, fabrication and Workload to quantities take-off and clash detection is very much automated with the used of computer software; human effort can be diverted more to the study of serviceability, constructability and maintainability effectively. To achieve this preferred design workflow, an effort to implement integrated project delivery (IPD) is required. And, IPD has to be empowered by IDD (integrated digital delivery) with the adoption of BIM (building information modeling /management).
Typical work effort of construction projects adopts a traditional design flow where quantities were estimated based on 60-70% developed design details to award a contract and commence with physical implementation; construction team is neither allocated with adequate time resource, nor, given sufficient information to plan and coordinate the job Pre-construction review if performed is most likely focuses on serviceability in complying with client’s and regulatory requirements; Where as, considerations on constructibility and maintainability can hardly be studied to the level of reasonableness despite that the ability to impact project is better, and the cost is lower if design changes are introduced prior to physical implementation.
Average growth of Malaysia online food market was approx. 18—19% prior to the disruption of Covid-19 which activated the flip of the norm; the actual growth rate in year 2020 is more than 5 times the normal growth, reaching a market size of 6.2 million consumers. Now, knowing that implementation of National BIM e-Submission (NBeS) will start this year in 2021, and if comprehended why BIM adoption is essential in digitalization of the construction industry to unleash productivity; seeing the emerging trend of more than 70% BIM adoption in countries including US, Singapore and Australia (Malaysia is estimated between 20-30% adoption with growth rate of between 3-5%); is it hard to foresee the “flip” happening within the next two years and convince ourselves to get on the train of BIM adoption towards sustainability?
