Transforming Construction?
8.0 Conclusion
One of the key objectives in adopting the Production Management
approach, based on BIM or otherwise, is as far as possible in this
specific area, to replace human intuition and guesswork with
systematic data collection, calculation and aggregation. People are
simply not very good at some tasks. By reducing dependence on them,
these tasks can be carried out more accurately and more reliably and
the people can be freed up to perform more valuable work. Our
general argument is that production status information on the
project should just emerge, as continuous feed-back, a pure stream
of raw data from the workface; a natural by-product of the project's
production processes.
Before EPOS, retailers knew startlingly little about the state of
operations in their stores. Full stock takes were carried out
typically only every six or twelve months, generally as part of the
accounting reporting process. Response to changing circumstances
like weather conditions or fashion trends was hopelessly sluggish.
Profitability could be calculated only at the overall store level.
Above all, stock level planning and pricing schemes depended
entirely on the personal observation, hunches and guesstimates of
individual floor and departmental managers.
Managing a large construction project today is like trying to
manage a large supermarket without an EPOS system. Everything
depends on the individual experience, the quality of judgement and
intuition of people like estimators, planners, gangers, section
managers and site managers. Estimates and plans are based on private
"black books" and rules of thumb. Progress assessments and forecasts
are based on similarly subjective methods and are prone to a variety
of errors. The overall approach to goal setting and progress
reporting tends to be unmethodical, unsystematic and ultimately
unverifiable. From this perspective, the amazing thing about
construction projects is not that so many of them fail. The really
amazing thing is how many of them succeed as well as they do.
The imperative for the retailer is to manage stock levels as
accurately as possible. By knowing absolutely accurately his stock
levels, at this atomic level of detail, product by product, hour by
hour, the retailer can forecast absolutely accurately the
profitability of his store overall and product by product, at any
point in time.
The imperative for the constructor is to manage production levels
as accurately as possible. For him production is dealt with in terms
of individual installed components: individual steel beams, concrete
columns, pipe spools, door sets and so on. By knowing accurately his
production levels, component by component, day by day, the
constructor can control his operations and those of his supply chain
with unprecedented accuracy. He can also forecast accurately the
man-hours required to complete his project, thus the end date, as
well as the associated cost at completion.
EPOS was not developed by IT companies or product manufacturers;
it was created by a group of big retailers, in the mid-1970's. Their
aim was exactly as we've described here for Production Management:
to replace operations level human intuition and guesswork with facts
and calculation.
They envisaged the EPOS system as being an information model of
the store and its supply chain. In this model, precisely specified
date entities are used to represent the things that exist and the
actions that can be performed on them at the fundamental, operations
level of the business. The checkout tills and bar code readers are
the interface between the EPOS model and the real store. Model and
store are fully integrated. Every time something happens in the
store, the model is updated with a new piece of data. And by setting
specific parameters, the model can be used to control events in the
store, such as stock levels, sale price and suchlike. Crucially
though, the EPOS model acts like a huge vacuum, sucking up thousands
of bits of data every day as customers flow through the store and
goods flow in and out, building the picture, providing the knowledge
the company's managers need for analysis and informed decision
making.
BIM models, Building Information Models, can be used in an
exactly analogous way in construction, to model, not just the
physical buildings, but also the processes of their construction.
The value of BIM as a visualisation and simulation tool have been
touched on earlier. The truly transformational effect of this
technology will come from its use in Production Management and
project control.
EPOS information now drives the entire retail industry: sales
forecasting, stock control, supply chain management, quality control
and most other operational functions. The result is an industry that
has been transformed over the past thirty years: massively improved
customer satisfaction, wider product ranges, higher quality
products, cheaper; more profitable businesses, growing and
developing, providing greatly improved career opportunities for more
young people.
BIM-based Production Management will do very much the same for
construction: predictable projects, satisfied clients, increased
volumes of business, higher margins, sustainable profits, increased
investment, all leading to a truly high technology, high value
industry - a great industry to do business with and a great place in
which to make a career.