Enterprise Digitalization in Building Industry, Just Like "Little Horse Crossing the River"

Digital transformation is a systematic project involving all aspects. We need to master the critical procedures, key cognition, and crucial schemes and paths, making peers of the building industry clearly aware of the way that digital transformation should take.

Digital building drives industrial transformation and upgrade

Digital Building is a concept first proposed in 2016 and came out with the concern that digital technologies, no matter big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, IoT, or BIM, will ultimately serve the building industry to make every project a success and make every enterprise grow.

As for how to integrate digital technologies to better serve the building industry? Only systematically upgrading considering the whole process, all elements and participants can help achieve this goal. Digitalization, online operation, and intelligence in the process need support by a platform.

Among them, the Digital Twin is a crucial concept. Most enterprises are still in the "digital model" stage, and data generated by physical objects have to go through massive processing and manual transmission before they can reach digital objects. So, can we use the data to drive mechanical equipment and automate the data transmission? The expected Digital Twin means a totally automatic data flow.

Digital Twin actually covers many aspects, including product digitalization, project digitalization, process digitalization, and production digitalization. With digital building, we want to clarify the above scene. However, this can't be done in one day or one year and requires continuous improvement.

Specifically, for an individual enterprise, what are the tasks? Here are three major challenges.

First, the challenge of strategic positioning. Digital transformation is a strategic issue for top leaders. However, the reality is that many top leaders have no knowledge and experience of digitalization. How can they make decisions under such circumstances? Many people believe that digitalization will overturn the industry, but what are the new business models and new business opportunities? These are very big challenges for decision-makers.

Second, the challenge of solution selection. Nowadays, many enterprises have started their digitalization journey, but they have different concepts and solutions of digitalization covering the middle platform, platform, BIM, and big data. But, what are the differences between these solutions, how to select, and what are the criteria for selection? These are the challenges that enterprises will face when they go digitalization.

Third, the challenge of implementing approach. For an enterprise, the best way to digitalization is to target the most crucial part with the least cost and bring it to effect as soon as possible. It's unsustainable if the enterprise has to spend 5 or 10 years to see the effect, and if this time is shortened to half a year or one year, such digitalization will be easier.

Three levels of digital transformation and upgrade for enterprises in building industry

How to solve the three challenges of enterprise digitalization? We can analyze these from three levels: position digitalization, project management digitalization, and enterprise management digitalization.

Level 1: Position Digitalization

The front-end position is designers. If designers still use the traditional drawing method instead of digital method, the follow-up work will lack support. At present, many digital products are available for designers. For example, Glodon’s digital architecture design product, is a digital product for designers that runs through the whole process following the concept of digital twin. Besides architectural design, digital products also spring up in other fields, such as structure, MEP, municipal roads, plumbing, and utility tunnels, etc.

For construction enterprises, how to digitalize production and O&M (operation & maintenance) posts? We need to start with the five elements of "personnel, machine, material, method, and environment". "Personnel" refers to the digitization of labors, characterized by lean management of personnel through the IoT technology, such as helmet positioning; "machine" refers to the digitization of mechanical equipment, characterized by the AI+5G technology that reduces costs, improves efficiency, and ensures safety, such as unmanned excavation; "material" refers to the digitization of materials, characterized by efficiency improvement, burden relief, and data accumulation through AI technology such as intelligent rebar checking;  "method" refers to the digitization of technics, characterized by the application of BIM in three-dimensional visualization briefing, such as visualization of technical briefing; "environment" refers to environmental digitization, characterized by the IoT-based real-time and comprehensive scene perception, such as real-time environmental monitoring.

Digitalization of management posts mainly covers three dimensions: space management, time management, and project collaboration. By providing engineers with professional and intelligent tools of the BIM generation and deepening, schedule preparation and control, and multi-post collaboration, we can improve work efficiency, increase the winning rate of bidding, shorten the construction period, and save costs, bringing success to projects by scientific means. For example, the integrated construction software can reduce the construction BIM generation time to 2 hours for beginners. The construction scheduling software can improve the planning efficiency by 3-9 times, help shorten the construction period, and save costs by 10%-30%. The Gwork Collaboration Platform regards "document collaboration", "process approval", "drawing-model collaboration ", and "mobile application" as a core and connects engineers, data, and processes through the cloud collaboration environment, thus dramatically improving the collaborative efficiency of project participants.

Glodon has applied these concepts to its own projects. We try to build the Glodon (Xi'an) Digital Building R&D Center with new management modes, more digital tools, and digital building concept.

The 9-storey building, which clarifies one model for multiple uses via "design-deepening", takes the reasonable loss of value into account based on the BIMMAKE model, and extracts the planned quantities from each location breakdown of the project. By the comparison of the estimated quantity, estimated quantity by design phase, actual usage on site, there is only a -0.41% error between the planned and actual quantities, achieving the goal of onsite lean management.

By sticking to the self-built and self-operated engineering practice, Glodon has built the Xi'an R&D Center into an international cutting-edge, green, and intelligent pilot application of digital building. The project applies the IPD project management mode, implements data-driven lean construction, and relies on the integrated application of digital building platform, system, and software/hardware tools to achieve the digitalization, online and intelligent application during the construction process.

Level 2: Project Management Digitalization

A construction site usually uses many decentralized management tools including labor, materials, and schedule management. However, such single-point informatization cannot meet the needs of project management. The demands of enterprises in building industry has changed now: escalated from the demand for single-point informatization to the systematic demand for the digital transformation of projects and enterprise.

Enterprises in the building industry need to strive for the integrated management of production factors. For example, the BIM + smart site can accurately estimate the quantities, personnel demand, and material demand before construction to achieve the PDCA cycle. BIM plus construction site will generate massive data that allow data-based management of production, technology, safety, finance, labor, and materials, thus the decision-making will be more reliable for the project manager.

Project-level command and dispatching solution can create a perfect visual scene: to improve dispatching efficiency by 50%, reduce resource waste by 5%, and have zero schedule delay. Based on GIS, BIM, IoT and AI, this solution helps the visualization of project dispatching. Besides, IoT-based surveillance helps safety and quality monitoring to achieve intellisense. Also, "project brain" assists scientific and efficient decision-making in terms of project management and control.

We hope that all projects can go digital in management but customized with different focuses as well as for different project scales. For this concern, Glodon has built its platform and components to adapt to different projects. In this way, every project manager can see critical project information that he is interested in every day and develop "project DNA".

Level 3: Enterprise Management Digitalization

When posts and projects are digitalized, and related data are used for zero-slack sharing, we can move to the company level and coordinate management based on these data. Data-driven approach at each level will bring great value to posts, projects, and companies.

For an enterprise, project-enterprise integration is crucial. Based on project-enterprise integration, we can coordinate and allocate resource, and make decisions at the company level. What's more important is the accumulation of corporate data assets. All data are an accurate reflection of real project dynamics. In turn, it can support project decision-making and project management.

The business system (including the report management system, BIM construction system, and smart construction site system) supports the production dispatching data center, forms multidimensional data sets, analysis paradigms, data mining modules, master databases, and metadata configuration., It further improves the group control and project control via the thorough data presentation in both horizontal and vertical dimensions, fostering the real "enterprise management brain". Enterprises at home and abroad can keep track of all projects, status on operation management, production management, safety management, science & technology quality management, and large equipment, etc.

Such management is critical for the big decisions of enterprises. But we can act more precisely. For example, the enterprise-level labor management integration connects the national and local labor monitoring and management platforms, supports various real-name management of project labors in infrastructure and house construction, and improves the efficiency and standardization of project labor management and zeroing employment risks. This initiative accumulates big data of enterprise labor management and helps projects succeed at high quality and favorable prices.

For enterprise cost, "labor" and "materials" are two major factors. If every project can receive digital support, such as intelligent checking and acceptance, onsite supervision, mobile transmission, real-time operation, AI counting, and scanning reconciliation, the intensive management and lean operation can come into being. Currently, in China, Glodon’s material and vendor management system is serving over 900 enterprises and over 7000 projects nationwide, managing some 370,000 suppliers for construction enterprises. This system has reduced the material loss rate for contract fulfillment and consumption by 2 to4%, provided enterprises with ability to improve project benefit by at least 1%, and assisted in improving management efficiency by 50%.

What should enterprises do for the digital transformation?

For an enterprise, what are the tasks for digital transformation? Let look back at the three questions:

First, how to choose the strategy? Digital strategy should be deeply integrated with business strategy. Business digitalization allows us to identify an enterprise's business level, carry out lean management of projects, and precisely position the enterprise's core competence, thus escalating to the enterprise-level platform, where we can eliminate information isolation and man-made barriers, scale up the enterprise's core competence, and share the advantages within the enterprise. Finally, it enables digital business and uses data for efficiency promotion, intensive management, and effective decision-making.

Second, how to choose the solution? The criteria of enterprise's solution for digital transformation are very simple: it must provide business value and complete systematic planning. Technology is not the only concern, and  the business value is more important. This is not a problem that can be solved by developing a software or a cloud computing only. We need to consider the entire process covering the early strategic planning to scheme implementation, even the personnel growth. In this process, systematic planning, design, and schemes are essential factors.

Third, what are the specific steps? As we can see, the streamline flows clearly from post digitalization, project management digitalization, to enterprise decision-making digitalization. Regarding these three stages of digitalization, the first stage is not the prerequisite for the next two, but the first two stages are the basis of enterprise decision-making digitalization. Only by digital iteration through all these three stages can we find the way to enterprise digitalization.

What should we do if decision-makers don't understand digitalization, or talents with digitalization knowledge are not available? For enterprise decision-makers, knowledge about digitalization is mandatory. For the cultivation of talents with digitalization knowledge, we must stick to the rule that actions speak louder than words. We never learn how to swim just standing on the shore. 

Decision-makers, middle-level managers and grass-roots personnel must pay down-to-earth effort in practice instead of indulging in empty talk for every enterprise's digitalization. Only in this way can we promote the digital transformation of enterprises.