Reimagining Singapore’s built sector
Megaprojects are an art to pull off. The Boston Big Dig was one of the most complex and technically challenging tunnels ever built in the US. It boasted a few engineering firsts: It had to be constructed under rail lines, an existing highway and around the city’s subway system. However, the project was rife with problems at the start. Infamously, costs ballooned from US$ 2.56 billion ( S$ 3.44 billion) in 1991, to US$14.8 billion at its completion in 2007. With design flaws, escalating costs and multiple schedule overruns, the tunnel faced leaks after construction, killing a woman after a section collapsed.
While not all projects are behemoth to begin with, the coordination of a built project is in itself a delicate juggling act. Parties like consultants, suppliers, contractors and architects have to communicate and coordinate work clearly. And with so many stakeholders involved in the built process, it comes as no surprise that one tiny mishap can botch the whole job.
“One of the big reasons that we end up having project delays and construction delays is always because of [design] changes,” says Ashith Alva, deputy chief development officer and senior vice- president for project management at CapitaLand. Although Covid-19 has been faulted to cause widespread delays in the completion of developments in Singapore, the issue of design changes contributing to construction delays has always been present, he says.
Alva was speaking at a panel discussion at the launch of an Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD) dashboard, a pooled platform that extracts key data from various construction stages like design, fabrication, construction and asset management and operations. The dashboard — a joint effort between the Real Estate Developers’ Association of Singapore (REDAS) and consultancy KPMG — aims to identify gaps and inefficiencies throughout the built process from the data gathered, with an end goal of streamlining the citystate’s built processes as a whole.
Digital is the future
But in order to level up the industry’s built capabilities, firms each have their own part to play by going digital and making that a priority. Speaking from experience, Alva — who has led multiple on- site projects for CapitaLand — says that tech like Building Information Modeling ( BIM) has helped his team greatly. “My personal involvement in BIM began close to 10 years ago, when I worked on a fairly complex project, and in that, we realised that without visualisation, it would have been very difficult to go through with the project,” he recalls. The 3D-modelling software allows architects, engineers and contractors to plan, design, construct and manage buildings together.
“You can very quickly see problems upfront, and make sure it’s resolved before it goes to site”, he adds.
“So I saw firsthand the benefits it brought on, and subsequently when I worked on Jewel later, we could take this to another level,” Alva says. Spanning a total gross floor area (GFA) of 135,700 sq m, Jewel Changi Airport is a 51:49 joint venture between airport operator Changi Airport Group and CapitaLand. Features that captivate tourists once they touch down in Singapore ( at least before Covid- 19, anyway) include a 40m- high Rain Vortex, the world’s tallest indoor waterfall, and a sprawling 14,000 sq m rooftop Canopy Park with sky nets, mazes and slides.
Efforts of digitising processes in the built environment has been a top-down push from authorities. Back in 2015, the Singapore government mandated BIM submissions for building projects with a GFA greater than 5,000 sq m, in a bid to fast- track and streamline the process for regulatory submissions.
In October 2017, the Singapore government outlined its Construction Industry Transformation Map, banking on digitally integrating work processes and connecting stakeholders working on the same project throughout the whole construction and building life- cycle. This would span design, fabrication and assembly on- site, and the operations and maintenance of buildings.
The benefits of a push to digitalisation would be the time and cost saved, and reduction of abortive work downstream. Estimates show that a transition to digital processes, if done right, can result in cost savings of 8% to 9% in each phase of the entire construction process, based on KPMG’s global benchmarks.
Slow tech adoption
Globally, the adoption of tech and digitalisation in the built environment sector has been slow. A 2019 KPMG survey of 223 professionals in the built sector revealed that only 20% considered themselves innovative leaders in the space, with varying focuses on integrated project management reporting systems, owning a tech vision and road map, and paying deliberate attention to innovation to attract talent.
In Singapore, the sector has been lagging in tech adoption, particularly with smaller firms. Despite the mandate of electronic submissions for projects of GFA sized over 5,000 sq m, this constitutes only less than 20% of the total number of projects in Singapore, and are largely undertaken by bigger and more established players.
Experts also believe that the relatively cheaper construction costs in Singapore has slowed down tech adoption among smaller firms. Compared to countries like Australia, labour costs in Singapore are far cheaper, thereby offering a smaller trade- off between adopting technology and sticking to a labour- intensive output. Due to this, “there hasn’t been that fundamental driver to achieve productivity at [ a higher] level”, says Richard Paine, managing director of Paya Lebar Quarter by Lendlease, an Australian- listed developer.
One other aspect is the nature of the built industry, requiring unique specifications in each project. “If you are doing a development project, its bespoke, it’s got specific zone site conditions that cannot be replicated in another project”, explains Paine. In contrast, industries that have digitised way earlier tend to be those employing a repetitive process, such as manufacturing, he says.
Looking ahead, as the built industry transforms and competition among firms intensifies, it has become even more crucial for businesses to digitalise. Chairman of the Building and Construction Authority IDD steering committee Lee Chuang Seng likens it to eating at a buffet and having a wide array of dishes to pick from. “For those who are digitised, the world is their oyster”, and as the region develops, they can transfer their skills to other countries, he says. Companies that fail to do otherwise can only compete for a shrinking slice of the pie.
With the pooled IDD dashboard, Alva hopes that more insights can be gleaned from it. There is a very intricate process that goes behind running a project successfully, one that is built on many layers, he says. “Whether it’s how you get the design brief out of the way, how you structure the authority submissions, how you call tender and things like that. And if you don’t have a robust process to organise your information properly, then you’re going to run into problems later,” he cautions.
“From this exercise, I’m hoping that we are able to extract where the pain points are, and then, again this is going to benefit all of us — how do we tweak our own processes to avoid such problems downstream, and make the whole process much more efficient going forward.”