MISBE 2011

10:30 General Paper Session W65 - Collaboration and integration in design and construction
Chair: Will Hughes

10:30 15 mins	THE RISE OF THE ZZP’ER (SELF-EMPLOYED PROFESSIONAL) IN THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY Kars van der Kamp Abstract: 55% of all carpenters is self-employed (zzp’er), 37% of plasterers or wall-/floor finishers is zzp’er, and 28% of the bricklayers and interpolators is zzp’er. Of all the business in the construction sector, 15% is now done by independent professionals. The figures are taken from a recent publication of the Economic Institute of Construction (EIB). The Institute confirms a trend in recent years. The EIB predicts that, despite the crisis in the construction industry, the evolution towards more zzp’ers in construction continues and is expected to go on: 30.000 in 1999 to 79.000 in 2009 and possibly 125.000 in 2020. This development raises questions. Who is the zzp’er? What motivates him? Is it money, the beautiful van, his independent status? Or is there possibly more behind it? Could it be that businesses in the construction industry in general fail as employers? These and other questions gave rise to further literature- and field research into the backgrounds, characteristics, motivations and expectations of the construction-zzp’er, and into the reasons construction companies have to hire them. Furthermore: what are the implications for collaboration in the future? Is this the beginning of the end of the job in the construction industry?
10:45 15 mins	STUDY OF THE SUBMITTAL PROCESS USING LEAN PRODUCTION PRINCIPLES Ana Catarina Pestana, Thais Alves Abstract: In the Architecture, Construction and Engineering (AEC) industry office activities link the information flows from project teams and the production processes on the field. Despite their importance to the overall project, office activities have been overlooked and several authors point out that they are often mismanaged, lack planning, or are buffered to account for the great amount of variability within processes developed at the office level, eventually resulting on site inefficiencies and cost overruns. This paper presents a study of the submittal process through the use of Lean Thinking. Submittals are documents exchanged between the general contractors, subcontractors, the project architect and its team of designers and consultants. Submittals carry information about products and processes used to deliver a project, and are submitted from the parties constructing the project, or supplying materials to it, to the designers so that the submitted information can be checked for conformance to project specifications. The study shows that for the project investigated the submittal process lacked transparency, had low workflow predictability, and showed low levels of reliability. The study concludes that the submittal process can be streamlined by enhancing communication and information sharing amongst stakeholders, through the understanding of the causes of variation in lead times and the understanding of participants’ needs.
11:00 15 mins	TOWARDS THE USE OF PROJECT ALLIANCE: JOINT DEVELOPMENT OF TEAM SELECTION PROCEDURES AS AN EXAMPLE OF STEPS TAKEN Pertti Lahdenperä Abstract: PERTTI LAHDENPERÄ VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Finland Pertti.Lahdenpera@vtt.fi Keywords: project alliance, collaboration, selection criteria, shortlisting, competition ABSTRACT Project alliance is a relatively fresh project delivery method where the owner and service providers, the designer and the constructor, hare the risks of the project and the payment to the service providers is tied to the overall success of the project. It is based on a multi-party contract between the key actors to a project, who implement it through a joint organisation and observe the principles of information accessibility in pursuing close cooperation. The project alliance system evolved from the need to improve the implementation of demanding and risky investment projects. Experiences from the model from “down under”, where it has broken through, reached Finland some years ago. Since then, the Finnish Transport Agency, including its predecessors, has intended to introduce the system in its transport infrastructure projects. The first planned projects involve rail renovation and urban road tunnel construction that are about to start in the very near future. The procurement process for service providers has already started with one of the projects and will start later this year with the other. This paper sheds light on the present state of the preparations for applying project alliance in Finland. After reintroducing the key ideas and principles of project alliance and how they reached Finland, the presentation focuses on the initial joint development between the Finnish Transport Agency, the industry and VTT. The development of qualitative team selection process and criteria is singled out for more detailed review as an example of steps taken so far. In that work, the legal praxis concerning competitive tendering in public procurement was found a special challenge which is why it was considered that the implementer selection procedure based on competence (or quality) alone could not be introduced as such. On the other hand, there was the desire to avoid heavy competition involving design and total pricing. Another challenge was to make a clear enough distinction between reducing the number of candidates and tender evaluation as concerns suitability criteria. As a result, a procedure of competitive selection is established for the early involvement of service providers through a collaborative approach. Service provides are selected as a team; in other words, designers and builders are not selected separately and matched. According to the model, selection takes place through elimination of candidates and a subsequent two-phase tendering process: the qualitative tender precedes the workshops that are part of evaluation, followed by submission of tender price data. Then, selected service providers develop the project and its designs in cooperation with the owner before the actual target cost is set and the parties are ready to finally commit to the implementation of the project in question. Later legal consultations have, however, encouraged the owner to depart from the use of the calculated/comprehensive tender price estimate as a selection criterion for the first projects, and the price component is likely to consist only of the fee percentage. Correspondingly, the process also differs from the presented one. Therefore, the proper legal praxis concerning competitive tendering in public procurement, that was said to have been found a special challenge earlier, may still remain so. It is likely that views on the presented solutions will evolve as experiences are gained; as they have until now. Despite all the confusion, the ambience generated by the efforts so far is promising, and it seems that all the parties look forward to taking up the practical work and seizing the benefits a collaborative project delivery is likely to offer.
11:15 15 mins	USING ‘WHOLE LIFE CYCLE VALUE’ TO EVALUATE INFRASTRUCTURE MEGAPROJECTS Brenda Hongbo Xie, Mohan Kumaraswamy, Jacky Chung Abstract: Keywords: criteria, evaluation, stakeholders, whole life cycle value ABSTRACT Project evaluation is an effective tool in project management as it provides stakeholders with a management process through which they can learn from the past and perform better in the future. Although various project monitoring and evaluation methods have been used in the construction industry, most of these traditional evaluation approaches emphasize the three basic success criteria of time, budget and quality. However, recent research emphasizes ‘satisfaction’ of the key stakeholders as also important. It is therefore necessary to develop a more holistic evaluation tool to evaluate projects from perspectives of all key group stakeholders. However, it appears that no systematic project evaluation approach focusing on project stakeholder perspectives, has been developed. This paper aims to develop systematic evaluation criteria, based on the concept of whole life cycle value (WLCV), which integrates all the key stakeholders’ value objectives and can be used to evaluate an infrastructure megaproject more holistically and comprehensively. Projects aim to deliver value, including cost savings for client, desired functions for all end-users and other stakeholders over the whole life. The exercise of identifying value objectives of key group stakeholders and integrating these value objectives into the client value objectives, and next formulating reasonable WLCV criteria are hypothesized to be key contributors to achieving maximum project WLCV. It is therefore important to be able to identify, analyze and deal with the expectations of each group of stakeholders over the entire project life time, i.e. from client requirements formulation up to demolition / re-use. In order to maximize WLCV, we must identify its essential components, namely: significant main-criteria for measuring project WLCV, as well as related sub-criteria which will help evaluate specific dimensions of the parent main-criteria. To be holistic as intended, both main and ‘sub’ criteria should relate to all stakeholders including the client. Based on a comprehensive literature review in evaluation, decision making and value management studies, several semi-structured interviews with experts in academia and industry, and findings from the first stage of a relevant case study, this paper proposes a preliminary WLCV criteria system for infrastructure megaprojects. A preliminary WLCV model will be formulated in the next stage of this research, based on the findings of a planned questionnaire survey. This would help clients to find which components of the project WLCV are more critical and then pay more attention to those parts, e.g. in collecting and distilling relevant experiences from past projects and deploying knowledge so acquired in future projects, to increase project WLCV. All other stakeholders can also benefit from this, as the client could then consider and assign reasonable weights / scores to their value objectives when identifying target components of the project WLCV. This paper concludes with a discussion of some of the major difficulties in identifying, balancing and formulating WLCV criteria and some useful directions and opportunities for further research in this field.
11:30 15 mins	BIM-BASED USER PRE-OCCUPANCY EVALUATION METHOD FOR FACILITATING THE DESIGNER-CLIENT COMMUNICATION IN DESIGN STAGE Weilin Shen, Qi Ping Shen Abstract: This paper introduces a BIM based user pre-occupancy evaluation method (UPOEM), which is applied in architectural design stage for the aim to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the communication between designers and clients. There are constant interaction between the clients’ requirements and designers’ solutions during the early design stage. However, there are some problems emerged during the designer-client communication process, such as inexperienced clients have difficulty in understanding 2D drawings; there is a lack of an efficient method to remind the design brief and help the clients to review the design; as well as the time constraint on the communication. The building information model (BIM) or BIM tools have provided a better platform to demonstrate both of the graphical and non-graphical information of the design. However the BIM tools paid less attention on facilitating clients to understand how their activities are accommodated in the building model, or helping them to express their requirements and feedback on the design. Therefore, this proposed method simulates the end users’ activities in the future built environment based on building information models, so as to improve the clients’ understanding on the design; a clients requirements and feedback interface is also designed to help clients express requirements and review the design. A framework of applying the UPOEM in conventional designers-users communication meetings is proposed in this paper.
11:45 15 mins	VALUE-BASED BRIEFING, DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT OF HOSPITAL BUILDINGS Theo van der Voordt, Johan van der Zwart Abstract: Corporate or Public Real Estate Management is usually defined as the management of the real estate portfolio of a corporation or public authority by aligning the portfolio and services to the needs of the core business, in order to obtain maximum added value for the business and to contribute optimally to the overall performance of the organization. Recent paper explores the concept of adding value by real estate and related performance indicators in connection to organizational goals and objectives, and the way it is or could be applied in value-based briefing, design and management of buildings. The conceptual framework is being illustrated with research findings on hospital buildings. In the Netherlands, healthcare real estate is increasingly perceived as a strategic resource due to alterations in healthcare legislation and finance system. During the last decade the government transformed the old budgetary system into a so-called regulated market system. In the former system the proposal for a new hospital building or renovation of an existing building had to be approved by the government to fit with the planning regulations (number of beds per 10,000 inhabitants), the maximum number of square meters per bed or per function, the maximum budget for investment costs per square meter, and permit requirements laid down in the national Building Code. After approval all running costs related to the building were guaranteed by the government and paid by the insurance companies during the life-time of he building, independent of healthcare production. In the new system hospital organizations have to reimburse all real estate investments by production of healthcare products and services i.e. treatment-diagnosis combinations. Decisions on hospital real estate have a strong impact on organizational performance, both with regard to benefits such as creating a healing environment, satisfaction of patients, employees and visitors, labor productivity and image, as with regard to the costs of health care delivery and real estate life cycle costs. Political decisions, demographical and economical developments, innovations in medical technology and a continuously changing market of demand and supply are all part of a dynamic and unpredictable context, whereas healthcare real estate decisions have a long term impact. The ever changing context with new opportunities and risks and the involvement of a growing number of stakeholders necessitates to changing traditional hospital real estate management into a more businesslike and integrated approach. Although most healthcare organizations are aware of the necessity to change, many of them lack sufficient knowledge and tools to steer on the added value of corporate real estate in connection to organizational performance. Based on literature review, interviewing stakeholders, analyzing documents such as strategic accommodation plans, findings from Msc graduation projects and a PhD study into hospital real estate strategies in a changing context, a conceptual model is presented that links organizational objectives and possible added values of real estate. The research findings show how different hospitals prioritize different added values, depending on their overall organizational policy, its position in a network of health care providers and local context. A number of added values is elaborated on by opening the black box and showing which real estate interventions may cause a positive effect on patient satisfaction, labor productivity, marketability of the building and competitive advantage. The conceptual framework and research data may be used to support complex decision making in briefing, design and management of hospitals and other health facilities.
12:00 15 mins	COLLABORATIVE DESIGN OF PARAMETRIC SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE Hans Hubers Abstract: Sustainable architecture is complex. Many aspects, differently important to many stakeholders, are to be optimized. BIM should be used for this. Building Information Modelling is a collaborative process where all stakeholders integrate and optimize their information in a digital 3D model. Sometimes it is called Green BIM. But what exactly is that? Is the International Standard Organization IFC standard useful for this? And is it compatible with new developments in parametric design? Based on two years of feasibility studies for his design of one of the first sustainable office designs in the Netherlands, six years of directing the Union of Computer Using Architects, ten years of research and education at Delft University of Technology, where his dissertation was about collaborative architectural design in virtual reality, the author gives his vision on BIM from the point of view of architects. Advantages and disadvantages of BIM are listed. Full parametric design is needed because it keeps the design flexible and open for changes until the end of the design process. However it is not compatible with IFC; only object parametric design is. A possible way out of this paradox could be the use of scripts that only create objects if they are not already in the BIM database and otherwise only adapt their properties. An example of parametric sustainable architectural design explains the mentioned issues. Keywords: Sustainable architecture, BIM, collaborative design, parametric design, IFC.
12:15 15 mins	THE INTEGRATED MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS: THE ROLE OF THE MAIN CONTRACTORS Angelo Ciribini, Maurizio Constantini Abstract: The authors sought to assess the effectiveness of the integration of different Management Systems (Quality Management System, Environmental Management System, Health & Safety Management System) to be installed at a number of Main Contractors and Large Clients in order to improve the Contract Management. Accordingly to results gathered by the authors, Quality Management Systems are widespread in Italy over the last decade, because of a legal compulsory requirement stemming from the Public Works Acts enforced in 1994 and in 2006. Nevertheless, in spite of such a dramatic rise in the number of Contracting Firms' certifications conforming to the ISO 9001:2008 Standard, the reliability of Quality Control-related procedures failed tremendously, while the corresponding rules have been quite often discarded in the field. Actually, only a small amount of the Large Private and Public Client Organisations awarded their own tenders to main Contractors available and wishful to comply with Quality Planning’s clauses. On the other hand, very few Italian Contractors are certified in conformity to ISO 14001:2004 Standard and even less in conformity to the recent BS OHSAS 18001:2007 Standard. Consequently, it's nor surprising that neither Clients nor Construction firms have any practical perception of the document PAS 99:2006, a BS specification aimed to bring together the shared requirements and to support the integration of Quality, Environmental and Safety requirements; Social Accountability Management requirements (with reference to SA 8000) should find also place in such a perspective, if not for ethical reasons, at least to deal with unfair competition. Whenever constrained to adhere to possible requests established by the Clients, the best effor tthat Contractors display is intended to widen the scope of the basic Quality certification, installing inside the original Quality Management System the other ones. Through this action, Contractors set up a pseudoIntegrated Management System suitable to engender a sort of added value. Finally, the paper tries to highlight some findings dealing with such an approach linked to a firm belief of the authors: the efforts made by the Client towards an effectively integrated Management system could be easily made trivial whenever the Main Contractors chose not to reflect the Management System rules in their actual behaviour. Finally, the paper tries to highlight some findings dealing with such an approach: possible efforts made by the Client could be easily made trivial whenever the Main Contractors are distinguishing the very formal rules from its own current behaviours.