Information technologies are now widely available to enable the construction industry to work collaboratively, but their adoption and use by the industry is still very limited. Although many companies would like to adopt collaborative working in their projects they have serious doubts over the practicalities of its introduction and implementation.

The following article is an edited extract from Paul Wilkinson's new book, Construction Collaboration Technologies: The Extranet Evolution published by Taylor & Francis in September 2005. Paul is Head of Corporate Communications at BIW Technologies Limited.

The pros and cons of collaboration technologies

Many construction clients and their supply chain partners have been sceptical about the claimed benefits of construction collaboration technologies and have therefore been slow to adopt them.

Reading the vendors’ case studies yields numerous anecdotes about the tangible benefits achieved on paper-related costs:

• over £58,000 savings on printing, copying and postage during a £5 million, 30-week retail project (BIW)
• a £50,000 saving on printing, information distribution and general administration on a £60 million development (BuildOnline)
• a £12,316 saving on a £1 million project (Cadweb)
• a potential £27,250 net saving on a £10 million, two-year project (Causeway).

Similarly, with time savings, Seamus Mockler of Kajima told The IT Construction Forum 2004 London conference “Traditionally, in the UK it can take up to 10 days for drawings to be reviewed and then re-issued. By using BIW Information Channel we were able to reduce the drawing review process to an average of two days and to half a day at one point.”

It is more difficult to document savings relating to soft, indirect, intangible or more qualitative benefits. The claimed benefits can be roughly divided into the three key risk areas of time, cost and quality:

Cost

• fewer claims for lost, incorrect or out-of-date information (audit trail encourages accountability and adherence to programme)
• less re-working
• less reliance on paper (expensive to generate, distribute, store and retrieve)
• fewer disputes and litigation
• better control and forecasting of project-related cash flow
• lower IT costs (overheads for email, firewalls, etc., plus IT staff time, can be discounted).

• faster mobilisation of initial team members; subsequent new joiners can get ‘up to speed’ more quickly
• greater flexibility (anyone with computer and internet access can use the system)
• faster access to drawings, documents, etc., following issue (e.g. transaction poten¬tially completed in seconds online instead of hours)
• earlier/more timely involvement in key decisions (concept, planning, surveying, design, specification)
• less time wasted searching for information
• faster communications (supplier-specific decisions communicated more quickly and completely, streamlined processes, fewer RFIs)
• more information is shared immediately electronically instead of being scanned or re-keyed
• less employee time spent on administrative work, including form-filling
• greater employee productivity (e.g. project managers can manage more projects)
• more convenient information sharing – employee mobility no longer an obstacle
• fewer drawing revisions
• reduced design work from using the system to maintain and manage corporate design standards, for example
• fewer unnecessary project delays or earlier identification of mistakes or inconsis¬tencies; faster problem-solving and elimination of distribution, postal delays or other bottlenecks
• faster compilation of project hand-over information
• earlier completion dates due to time savings in transferring key information resulting in lower on-site costs and earlier revenues to owner/developers
• faster evaluation and resolution of claims.

• fewer mistakes
• avoidance of doubt through ‘a single version of the truth’: all data is stored on one system for authorised project members to see; core information available to all
• fewer data compatibility issues (e.g. no need for non-CAD users to have CAD software)
• less information overload, reduced reliance on email
• better collaboration: more open, cross-discipline discussion and coordination of design issues (users can review, discuss, mark-up, ask and answer questions), leading to...
• improved understanding of project and processes (better design, less duplication, fewer errors, less re-work), better problem-solving and better decision-making
• greater transparency - reporting tools can be used to summarise outstanding actions
• better reporting and tracking or auditability
• increased scope for creativity and innovation
• better implementation of and adherence to corporate standards
• improved monitoring of individual professionals’ and companies’ performance
• better customer/supplier relationships
• greater re-use of information within a project - less re-inventing the wheel
• as-built data and associated product information becomes part of knowledge base for future projects and part of operation and maintenance and health and safety systems
• more re-use of standard information across a series of projects – information is not dispersed along with the team members after project hand-over
• more resilient, reliable, robust and secure data management infrastructure
• improved levels of IT literacy among project team members.

One might also highlight the social and environmental benefits. In November 2004 BIW calculated that users of its system had distributed electronically enough drawings to build a pile of paper over a kilometre high. In an industry often maligned as low-tech, indirect benefits might include an improved reputation with clients at both company and industry levels.

The disadvantages of using construction collaboration technologies

Some supply chain members suggest that there is downside to the use of the technologies. If we revisit some of the cost, time and quality issues:

Cost

• Additional costs to purchase or upgrade telecommunications links and/or IT hardware to access and use collaboration systems efficiently.
• Additional supply chain costs to purchase, lease or upgrade drawing plotters or printers as drawings are no longer received in paper form (many users may still prefer to print out a drawing for commenting purposes).
• Additional costs of printing consumables pass down the supply chain.
• Electronic communication makes it easier to revise a drawing and may result in issue of more drawing revisions.

• Slower mobilisation of initial team members as they must first agree project protocols and, if necessary, be trained in use of the collaboration system.
• Additional training needs for subsequent new joiners.
• End-users may need training in multiple systems where, say, their business is working on several projects each employing a different system.
• Some system processes can seem very time-consuming.
• Multiplication of project communications – participants may adopt a ‘belt and braces’ approach to communication, sending information to all project participants instead of selecting just the relevant participants.

• Too much collaboration – allowing wider and easier access to information can allow more people (some unqualified) to offer unhelpful comments, ideas, etc.
• Too transparent: ‘Big Brother’ can monitor individual professionals and compa¬nies’ performance, which may be too transparent for some individuals or businesses.
• Only truly effective if all project team members use the system.
• Loss of interpersonal contact or interaction - fewer meetings or telephone conversations.

In most cases these issues are relatively short-term and not insurmountable, but they emphasise the need for teams to take a planned, detailed and pragmatic approach to the human aspects of the introduction and use of construction collaboration tech¬nologies. While a supply chain company may claim that the introduction of construction collaboration technology has necessi¬tated investment in new IT hardware or software or upgraded telecommunications, such steps would probably have been taken eventually and the equipment used to benefit other projects.

It can be difficult to determine whether benefits have been achieved either solely or partly due to the technology or whether they were due to other unrelated factors. For instance, how does one quantify the benefits of using collaboration technology on a project with a strong partnering ethos? Team members may experience, say, a dra¬matic reduction in the volume of paperwork produced, distributed and stored. While this may reflect the use of the collaboration system, the reduction may also have arisen because the team culture had removed the need for the many contract letters often found on traditional projects.

Perhaps more importantly, industry businesses will usually be reluctant to admit that they can be inefficient or make mistakes, that activities were duplicated, that tasks had to be redone, etc. Many project budgets are prepared with healthy contingencies built into them to allow for unplanned events, some of which often arise simply because of communication breakdowns between project team members. Detailed research into the use of collaboration technology on a project might expose such inefficiencies.

Independent research in the United Kingdom into the performance of construction collaboration technologies has been limited. Perhaps the most detailed and fascinating research, to date, was that undertaken in 2002 by an American–Finnish research project (ProCE – Project Management and Organisation in the Concurrent Engineering Environment). Numerous time and other quantifiable benefits were observed. They also identified significant monetary benefits, averaging about US$15,000 across the three European-based case studies. In each instance, the systems more than paid for themselves, returning a monetary saving equivalent to 1.9 times the cost of the ASPs’ services, mainly due to savings in communication and document costs.

While it is difficult to provide conclusive evidence to support and quantify all the claims for collaborative technologies– particularly those relating to intangible benefits – there is enough evidence to suggest that these claims are not just ‘hot air’. End-user enthusiasm suggests that use of the technologies solve more problems than they create. However, project teams need to measure the impacts on their projects objectively. Construction collaboration technologies are continually developing and there is still considerable scope for change within the market for them.