CIFE Bulletin July 2013

In this issue:

CIFE Welcomes New Member
CIFE Summer Program
CIFE Senior Management Meeting on Strategy
CIFE Seed Awards 2013-14
New CIFE Publications
CIFE Calendar

CIFE Welcomes New Member

We are pleased to welcome new member Yau Lee Holdings Ltd to the CIFE community. The company is based in Hong Kong and expanded its business to Mainland China in the 90s. The Company's major businesses include building construction, maintenance, renovation, plumbing and drainage works, electrical and mechanical works, building materials trading, precast products manufacturing and trading, property development, hotel and property investment, IT solution and services. Rosana Wong, a member of the board, is the principal CIFE representative.

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CIFE Summer Program 2013

CIFE recently concluded its annual Summer Program, which had the theme: “Current success and visions for success stories we really want to tell, and recipes for successful VDC (Virtual Designe and Construction) Implementation.” The program this year built on the immensely inspiring Summer Program last year with its many accounts of breakthrough performance by owners, designers, and builders (see the blog of ENR’s Tom Sawyer and an ENR report.)

Program participants came from around the world including Bolivia, Chile, Denmark, Hong Kong, Lebanon and the US. Participants appreciated the global perspectives and, in many discussions, related versions of challenges they face after hearing challenges from other cultures and countries. There was a consensus opinion that all have valuable things to learn from discussion of VDC implementation from the perspectives of other cultures and lines of business.

Another recurring theme was that organizations now implement VDC in new ways both for specific project value and for broad organizational learning. A few years ago, CIFE members happily discussed the successes of individual “pilot” or “demonstration” projects. They learned from experience that it was then as hard to use the new method on a new project as it was on the first. This year, there was discussion about broad scale professional development of VDC methods and discussion of multiple VDC and organizational management methods to support multi-discipline, multi-office and multi-company processes.

“The last 4 (or 40)” summarizes another recurring theme. Many speakers discussed taking design models to the field and back, typically using relatively centralized model development, placing the models in the cloud and use of some sort of tablet or mobile phone in the field to access models.
Continuing the example from the Summer Program last year, program speakers frequently cited measurable performance of VDC-enabled projects, e.g., “Estimated 20% savings on field labor,” and field productivity increase of 50% or more on three different projects, one with an astonishing 7x improvement, following introduction of model-based field installation work package planning.

Breadth of efforts was another inspiring theme from the program. Some examples highlighted were electronic drawing sets, immersive (CAVE) environments, visual project tracking, model driven field layout, model based estimating, several types of 4D, and VDC for infrastructure, closeout and operations and maintenance.

There were several discussions from outside the usual CIFE community. Steve Prusha of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) discussed the JPL use of collaborative model-based design and planning methods, work that originally inspired what we call Integrated Concurrent Engineering (ICE). He discussed a “Complete” model-based design structure with broad multi-disciplinary breadth, integrated heterogeneous system models that represent designs across the life-cycle, designs that are “Actionable” and describe not “what it is” but “what to do.” Perhaps most surprising and interesting, the integrated JPL project model has a representation of risk at its center.

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CIFE Management Meeting on Strategy

Collaborating with Professor Robert Burgelman of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, CIFE will host a meeting for senior management on the topic “Enterprise-level Virtual Design & Construction - Opportunities and Needs for Senior Management Initiative to Address Challenges of Building Today.” We plan this meeting to address the opportunity and need for continued high-level senior management support to get organization value from enterprise-wide Virtual Design & Construction (VDC) use. Inspired by project-level success, CIFE members have discussed the opportunity they see to increase organizational profitability through broadly increased productivity. In addition, they have discussed the opportunity they see to enhance the value of new projects for clients and potentially win new business through improved life-cycle facility performance, for example in the area of energy. Tentatively, the meeting is scheduled for October 16, just before the IAB. We will confirm details later in the summer.

At the recent CIFE Summer Program, we shared our vision that, collaborating with our members, CIFE works on significant industry challenges at a scale that enables global impact. We now focus specifically on construction productivity, which has declined with respect to the rest of the economy for four decades, and facility life-cycle energy use, which represents about 40% of global carbon emission.

Why this meeting at this time? First, the recent broad and significant project-level success of VDC suggests that the emerging opportunity for significant business value enhancement lies in enterprise-level innovation for CIFE member organizations. Second, we now see the opportunities for enterprise-level investments in VDC-based integration and automation to increase business value dramatically and ultimately change the nature and basic business structures of facility design, construction and operations.

A broad goal of this meeting is that participating organizations have sustained board of director-level attention to their strategies and methods to implement their versions for enterprise-level VDC. A second broad goal is to create some sort of continuing forum in which CIFE members can work synergistically toward their enterprise-wide VDC use. Deliverables of this meeting include statements of business performance targets and methods, specifically a set of potential target value performance objectives for enterprise-level VDC and a set of methods to support these targets, such as professional development methods, tools and believable performance data. Individual members can elaborate and specialize each of these for their individual circumstances.

We will discuss candidate topics for continued executive-level attention such as:
Professional development in VDC use for large numbers of technical staff of member organizations
Professional development for the staff members of strategic partner organizations;
Methods to bring metrics and evidence-based management to all projects;
Methods to enable integration and automation of significant design, planning and construction subtasks with the intent to dramatically improve productivity or value to clients, such as facility life-cycle energy use;
Opportunities for synergy among CIFE member organizations.

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CIFE Seed Awards 2013-14

We are pleased to announce the CIFE Seed Research Awards for the Academic Year 2013-14.

Space Constraint Method - M. Fischer, M. Lepech, R. Morkos
Using MDO to Support Sequential Conceptual Design Decisions - M. Lepech, M. Fischer, F. Flager, J.Basbagill
A Framework for Bringing 3D Printing into the Construction Industry - M. Fischer, V. Bazjanac, N. Mrazovic
Integrated Virtual Parts Library—Parts List Definition - M. Fischer, C. Kam, B. Schwegler, C. Chi, D. Hall, H. Chen, J. Wei, N. Zhao, P. Padachuri, S. Tao
Statistical Analysis of KPIs: the Missing Links in the VDC Decision Making Process - M. Fischer, C. Kam, S. Khalessi, D. Senaratna
Enhancing Pre-Construction Decision-Making on Sustainable Commercial Building Projects - M. Lepech, G. Griggs, K. Abraham
Achieving Large-scale Energy Reduction in Commercial Buildings Using Closed Loop Energy Analysis (CLEAN) - M. Fischer, C. Kam, P. Shiel