Optimize Facility Renovation, Repair, and Construction Delivery with Robust Business Processes

Real Property Owners, Contractors, Architects, and Engineers are under tremendous pressure to innovate, accelerate project delivery times, and minimize costs.   Also, all parties must implement methods to improve the customer experience of building users.
Many AEC organizations find these objectives difficult to achieve. They remain plagued by low productivity, a low-bid/change-order mentality, and adversarial relationships among all construction project participants.  As a result, building users are unsatisfied, facility management is treated as an expense versus an asset, and sub-optimal performance has become the norm.

Solutions to the above problems have existed for decades.  The are not, however, to be found in technology.   Performance improvements are available via LEAN business process and associated collaborative construction delivery methods.

The reason its hard for Owners, Facility Managers and AEC service providers to optimize operations is that collaboration,  team leadership, and asset life-cycle modeling/management are not areas of  core expertise.   They were generally not part of their formal education, nor their professional training.

Furthermore, the application of LEAN processes to Facility Management and AEC services requires  deep visibility into workflows, tasks, and detailed costs.   The latter is impossible without common terms, definitions, and data architectures, and reliance upon ad-hoc and inefficient manual processes that continuously “reinvent” the wheel, duplicate work, rely upon excessive management and control, and introduce variability.

When core facility life-cycle management processes, players, and systems are not fully integrated and on-board, and competency is not present in each required domain, any measurable improvement in outcomes is extremely challenging.

Integrated Project Delivery, IPD and Job Order Contracting, JOC are examples of efficient LEAN collaborative construction delivery methods than deliver on-time, on-budget, quality projects in excess of 90% of the time.   This level of performance remains unmatched by traditional design-bid-build, CM@R, or design-build. Both have been available for consistent implementation for decades.

Both IPD and JOC require an understanding of the challenges facing both Owners, AEC service providers, and building users.   Better education and awareness is the only viable path forward.    The good news is that both can be supported by technology to enable relatively low cost and consistent deployment.

In short the adoption of collaborative LEAN construction delivery processes and an asset life-cycle perspective lead the transformation from wasteful, unsatisfactory outcomes, to economically and environmentally improved results.

Ad-hoc practices are transformed into information-supported decision-marking that leverages multi-domain expertise and associated analytics,completely transparent, efficient and unified operations, and enhanced satisfaction for all stakeholders.

 

 

JOC – Job Order Contracting – Improving Productivity for Facility Renovation, Repair, Sustainability, and Construction

Being productive is not just about being efficient.  Sure, you can tweak a few things here to attempt be more efficient with respect to your numerous renovation, repair, sustainability, and construction projects, but substantial productivity gains require fundamentally  changing how you do things.

Doing something more efficiently is not as effective as deploying a process or technique that results in doing something a better way.

Improving construction productivity is not rocket science.  The sole reason construction productivity has been abysmal vs. virtually every other business sector is its failure to adopt standardized, proven, and collaborative processes.

Owners must learn more about collaborative and integrated project delivery methods:  IPD – integrated project delivery for new construction, JOC – job order contracting or renovation, repair, sustainability, and minor new construction, and PPP – private-public-partnerships.

IPD, and JOC, a form of IPD are neither radical nor new.  Both have been around and practiced for decades, however, very few Owners have taken the time to learn about these collaborative methods and/or how to implement them properly.

While “blame” is not the purpose of this article, Owners are, in fact, to blame.   They write sign the contracts and write the checks.  They have enabled the high level of waste throughout the construction industry.

Improvements of 20-25%+ on the procurement side, virtual elimination of legal disputes, and significant reduction of change orders are just a few of the benefits provided by IPD and JOC.  In addition, owners, contractors, and AEs tend to get more work done on-time and on-budget.  Also, what is delivered is what was anticipated.

Traditional design-bid-build is not a friend to collaboration and productivity improvement and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.   Low-bid, should most certainly be abandoned unless one is purchasing a commodity and all other variables are consistent.

Poor construction project management and associated traditional construction delivery method lead to  unsupportable levels of waste and overall dissatisfaction among all stakeholders – Owners, AEs, Contractors, Subs, Build Product Manufacturers, Oversight Groups, Building Users, and the Community.

Both economic and environmental issues are begin to force change, however, the pace has been glacially slow.  Far too much time has been spent upon 3D visualization techniques vs. efficient project delivery methods and associated life-cycle management of built environment.

Collaboration critical, but it’s more than a “buzzword”.  Collaboration must be implemented with proven business “best-practices” supported by technology and  continuously improved.

The key characteristics of IPD, Job Order Contracting and associated collaborative construction delivery methods are as follows:

1. Early and ongoing joint participation among Owners, Contractors, AEs …

2. Shared risk/reward

3. Transparent and/or standardize costs (example: a unit price book, UPB, based upon RSMeans or other dependable source)

4. Common terms and definitions / ontology

5. Supporting technology with embedded workflows/processes to enable consistent deployment, monitoring, and reduced implementation costs.

Collaborative construction delivery methods such as IPD and JOC change the way most Owners, AEs, and Contractors do things on a day-to-day basis.  Long term relationships and transparent information sharing are the norm vs. exception.

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Clouds, Collaborative and Integrated Solutions = Efficient Facility Renovation, Repair, Sustainability, and Construction

The convergence of global economic and environmental change with collaborative disruptive technologies is altering the very foundation of the Facility Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and  Operations sector.  Transformational change is upon all stakeholders; Owners, Contractors, Facility Users, Oversight Groups, Architects, Engineers, Building Product Manufactures…

Transparency, common lexicon, and the sharing and adoption of “best practices” with a focus upon PROCESS, embedded within and supported by technology is the clear direction.   Those unwilling to “share” and/or collaborate will face severe limitations as “Facebook” cloud-centric technology and associated collaborative processes for the built environment pound against the silo walls of monolithic dated software and isolated, unsubstantiated ad-hoc business methods.

BIM, building information modeling, will quickly evolve in everyone’s mind from 3D visualization to facility life-cycle management.  Tools such as Revit and Archicad will become the components of total BIM solution that they are vs. “BIM solutions”.  Cloud technology will integrated the previously separate domains of design, capital planning, project delivery, repair and maintenance, building automation systems, geographic information systems,  life/safety, security, operations, etc.

Furthermore, the fact that the sum of valued components can exceed the value of whole will become abundantly clear.  Best-in-class solutions from each of these knowledge domains will evolve and readily talk to each other… in an “apples to apples” manner, and “single point” systems such as IWMS, etc. will go by the way side.

BIM and the Cloud – 2012 – Article

via http://www.4Clicks.com – Premier software for construction cost estimating and efficient project delivery for JOC, SABER, IPD, IDIQ, SATOC, MATOC, MACC, POCA, BOA.  RSMeans strategic business partner and exclusive provider of enhanced 400,000 line item RSMeans Cost Database.