Design
39
Construction industry
needs integration
BIM, or building information modelling, is a buzzword that continues to dominate
conversations in the building industry — for good reason. Fuelled by government
initiatives and industry momentum around the world, BIM empowers companies to
plan infrastructure more effectively while reducing the cost and the complexity of
building and maintaining assets.
By Rob Stummer
At the heart of BIM is a computer-aided design
driven model that enables you to visualise assets in
three dimensions. This means that the model is no
longer simply a design tool: it becomes the master
data source of an asset and the foundation for
driving all the business functions related to it.
So you would think that construction and contracting
companies would be falling over each other in their haste
to implement end-to-end business systems, right?
Unfortunately, that is not the case. Perhaps more than
anything, what BIM has brought about is a realisation
that in many ways ours is an old-fashioned industry,
still hampered by archaic, Excel-based processes
and departmental silos. It has also reminded us that
businesses need to act now to remain competitive.
The second life of assets
Assets have a second, far longer life after construction.
As such, the industry is increasingly looking at the total
lifecycle of an asset, from construction expenditures to
operation costs — something that’s forcing construction,
engineering, and infrastructure companies to adopt a
much more joined-up, data-driven approach.
But many in the construction industry are still operating
with non-integrated systems across many manually
maintained Excel spreadsheets. Usually, project plans are
developed in a software tool such as Microsoft Project,
Primavera, or Asta, which are rarely integrated with other
business systems for engineering, procurement and
construction.
What is more, today’s computer design model typically
isn’t integrated with the rest of the project and
maintenance processes. This in turn creates the problem
of transferring information from the design tool into the
procurement, construction and maintenance systems.
According to Kenny Ingram, global industry director for
www.plumbingafrica.co.za
IFS, this is the primary fault line that BIM has uncovered.
“When processes are not joined up or automatically
integrated, companies are overburdened with high
overheads and cost inefficiencies,” says Ingram.
“They can incur damages by failing to keep to the key
parameters of time and budget. What’s more, they risk
being overtaken by competitors with smarter systems
who can offer better prices and who deliver a better
asset more quickly.”
BIM is a process
involving the generation
and the management of
digital representations of
physical and functional
characteristics of places.
ERP with a twist
This is why we’re continuing to see a significant shift to
deploying enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in
the sector. More and more construction and contracting
companies see the value in partnering with integrated
project solutions experts for managing budgets, time,
and risk.
But is ‘ERP’ really the right term to use?
Synonymous with finance and human resources in many
large enterprises, ERP is fundamentally a product-centric
Continued on page 40 >>
November 2016 Volume 22 I Number 9