Construction productivity in Singapore using Obayashi's building automated construction system

• Main Author: Zhou, Ji.
• Other Authors: Ting, Seng Kiong
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Civil engineering::Construction management
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/13070
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Construction Industry traditionally has the features of large-scale, prototypically designed and open located, etc. The whole project life is composed of extensive fragmentation of its design and construction process, which resulted in major communications and coordination obstacles being placed in the way toward achievement of greater efficiency. Compared with manufacturing, Construction Industry is a labor-intensive industry that is lucrative in profit margin and backward in technology innovation and productivity development. However "Necessity is the mother of innovation", with the progress of globalization construction companies are under intense competitive pressures that major changes are expected with respect to construction processes, products, organizations, resources, markets, methods, and technological strategies. In addition the current available Information Technology (IT) provided a new platform for construction technology innovation which is now grounded in a concept of "process view" rather than a traditional "task" or "functional" view. This concept is also reflected in the development of Building Automated Construction System (BACS) which is developed by several Japanese construction firms. In this system an indoor factory-like working environment is provided for all weather site construction. The construction productivity improvement is achieved through the way of prefabrication, standardization, computerization, systematization, and industrialization. BACS supports a high level of coordination between resources and processes at the job site. This has removed poor coordination successfully. In system various prefabricated building members are used in construction in a standardized way. The dependence on labor skills is therefore largely mitigated. China Square project is the first application case of this system outside Japan. The study on the effectiveness of this system in improving construction productivity is done in this research through a project process tracking report. The case study result concluded that the final efficient solution to improve construction productivity must be based on an overall innovative change that covers the whole process in construction. From a practical angle the result echoes the previous theoretical result that to improve the productivity performance in construction a "process view" is necessary.