SELANGOR (Aug 19): In Rehda Selangor’s Digital Real Estate Webinar Series on “Game Changer: Digital Transformation Journey in Suncon” held today, Sunway Construction (SunCon) virtual design & construction (VDC) senior manager How Yoke Teng and assistant manager Liew Ziqing talked about how VDC technology can be used to help improve efficiency in the construction business.

Moderated by Real Estate & Housing Developers' Association's (Rehda's) most recent past president and patron Datuk Seri Michael Yam, the webinar was attended by 373 participants. The previous two webinars of the same series discussed big data analytics and artificial intelligence, as well as drone reconnaissance and accessible virtual space.

How noted the importance of visualisation when it comes to handling certain construction challenges more effectively. “As a main contractor we often need to tender for a project within a short period of time…we need to come up with a quantity extraction and virtualise how the project looks like. Where there are certain challenges, we need to handle them more effectively and where coordination is important, visualisation is important. Hence, we are using VDC technology to help in all our six core businesses,” she said.

The six core businesses are building construction services, infrastructure services, mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) services, geotechnical engineering services, precast concrete products and sustainable energy services.

According to How, the VDC steering committee, which comprises industry players like planners, construction managers, engineers and architects, have come up with a digital transformation roadmap for all levels in the division. “We treat it as a new normal for our businesses. In the building information modelling (BIM) roadmap, we have categories 3D, 4D and 5D.”

In summary, the 3D information model provides graphical and non-graphical information, visualisation on space, clearance, mechanical, MEP services arrangement and aesthetic view, as well as resolving issues before construction.

The 4D model focuses on construction sequence, providing accurate schedule information and visualisations and can query project information and simulate construction development. Meanwhile, the 5D model is to do with project costs and can extrapolate quantities of model components, see costs in 3D representation, track changes and cost impact, as well as predict and analyse the project spending.

“In BIM, information is the main driver and is the most important, [so] we need to make sure the right piece of information goes into every single component in the BIM model itself,” How explained.

According to Liew, the future is in BIM. “All these things are at your fingertips. That’s exactly why we are talking about BIM, it is not so far away anymore, and it is not so expensive to use anymore, with the right tools and the right team in place to implement the whole process.”

In addition to the 3D, 4D and 5D models explained, Liew said that SunCon’s VDC roadmap also encompasses 6D (facility management with BIM), 7D (business of sustainability) and 8D (practising safety with digital solutions).

“As we already have all these BIM data, we can definitely extend this to facility management and we can gladly say that we have actually started the initiative and have done certain prototypes to look at how BIM can be useful for facility management,” he said.

According to Liew, SunCon has brought its 6D model to a Parcel F in Putrajaya that comprises 11 buildings. “Because they have such a big group of buildings, we have populated millions of assets into the system and digitalised all these info into the BIM facility management system.

“Our goal here is to expand the facility management with BIM to integrate with any other [components] you can think of [such as] water management, waste management and other innovations, and solar panels as well. The BIM facility management system should be part of the smart integrated township management system,” he added.

In the 8D model, Liew said the company has implemented a Telegram chatbot to capture all issues at site. “We want to make sure that any unsafe behaviour or actions at site are rectified before any accidents happen. This solves double handling of reporting and allows us to keep track of all these issues safely in a database, at the same time making it easy for use on site.”

When it comes to sustainability or the 7D model of the roadmap, Liew highlighted the use of solar panels. “We have started building solar panels and implementing it in Bandar Sunway three to four years ago. Now, Sunway is looking into the digitalisation of this sustainability efforts such as building a solar dashboard for clients to visualise and see all their savings in one go using a web format.

“We are also looking into other forms of sustainability such as a district cooling system, which we have [implemented] in Parcel F in Putrajaya.”

Lastly, Liew noted the importance of research and development to accelerate the digital transformation efforts and that SunCon is looking into more collaborations with universities for this.

At a poll during the event, about 71% of the participants have not started using BIM in current ongoing projects and have plans to adopt BIM for future projects. When asked to rate their understanding of BIM, the majority or 66% of participants rated their understanding of the technology at 50% or lower, while 29% of participants rated their understanding at 75%. Only 5% of participants rated their understanding of BIM at 100%.

The poll also revealed that the majority or 78% of participants rated their organisations’ digital readiness to date at 50% or lower. Meanwhile, 92% of participants said their organisations will need to invest on migrating its hardcopy/analogue data into digital formats for day-to-day operations.