7th Nordic Conference on Construction Economics and Organization

Mingle following the conference dinner at Rockheim – the National museum of Norwegian Rock history

The rocky landscape of Trondheim graced with multifarious vegetation and tree types was an astonishing sight to me since my eyes are now rather accustomed to relatively flat topography of Sweden. There was actually not so much time left for us for sight-seeing, yet I was highly thrilled by spectacular views of Nidaros Cathedral, splendid bridges over the river, and the elevated green lands of NTNU campus on my way to the conference venue. We were first gratified with two sunny days in a row, but were not as lucky utill the end and left the city in a yet fine misty drizzle.

It was a tremendous delight for me to meet Professor Keith Hampson from QUT one more time after talking to him last year in Gutenberg and being among the audience of his intriguing and inspiring keynote speech last month in Brisbane. I was actually rather confused by noticing the word "Norway" in front of his name in the attendants' list; something that he then partly clarified in his talk by showing the map of the world as perceived by Australians (upside-down compared with our conventional maps) which was supposed to prove that Australians had always been Nordic!

Keith's speech mainly depicted accomplished, ongoing, and planned research programs and activities for promoting a manifold sustainable construction practice within the Australian building industry. Solving current problems, exploring contemporary trends, and shaping the future are different levels and scopes of research according to him. He referred to - among others - the dramatic increase in private investment in building research compared with public funding; something that reflects the need for a more industry-oriented approach among research institutions to stay competitive.

It was also thrilling to meet Professor Kalle Kähkönen from Tampere University of Technology again. I met Kalle in Brisbane when he had revealed Tampere's ambitious plan for hosting the following occasion of the CIB conferences during a social dinner session in a fantastic Italian restaurant in the South Banc. In Trondheim, Kalle introduced their Quality Progress Model for construction where, above all, technical quality criteria were balanced against customer satisfaction. The presentation included amazing pieces of literature namely incremental evolution of the concept of quality control to quality management, and then total quality management over time. The notion of various categories of customers namely detracting, passive, and promoter types and how to manage and benefit them towards the highest quality for the product was another sub-topic raised in Kalle's presentation.

The Quality Progress Model (Savolainen et. al, 2013)

Sessions were opened up on Wednesday morning by Ole Jonny Klakegg from NTNU emphasizing the urge for green urbanization and value creation in the building industry. He mentioned the fragmented state of the industry as the most prominent obstacle to more profitability. Professor Anne Grete Hestnes from NTNU then discussed some other aspects of sustainable construction together with a variety of examples from Nordic countries and around the world, though focused on Norwegian construction society which enjoys a high rate of GDP and a stable economy. Stepwise development towards zero-energy and zero-emission buildings (ZEB's), evaluation of energy-efficiency at measurable scales such as buildings and building blocks, the increasing urge for provisions for cooling, implementation of active and passive solar technologies, integrated approach towards solar architecture, taking embodied energy in transportation of material, construction work, and operation phase into consideration in energy performance analyses, the need for a holistic approach for shifting from smart buildings towards smart cities, and finally energy-plus buildings were some headlines in her speech.

Keith Hampson's opening talk for the second day of the conference was followed by announcement of Statsbygg's awards for best papers by Ole Jonny Klakegg from NTNU. Anita Moum then talked on impacts of buildings on people's quality of life and the undeniable importance of knowledge and experience sharing in building and construction. The third speaker of the day was Peter Eiken who introduced the Bygg21 initiative. He articulated some interesting facts in his talk: the best average performance of construction works among Nordic countries belongs to Finland; Norway has the worst performance statistics in infrastructure construction; while Danish construction society is the worst in collaboration and has the highest rate of conflicts. Eiken also referred to the decisive role of a few construction managers whose modern way of thinking, humbleness, proactive attitude, and respected personalities helped overcoming problems in practice and drove the project forward. He then mentioned a multitude of challenges facing more efficient construction practices, namely demotivating public procurement legal structures.

Below, a summary of a selection of the works presented in the conference is put together and grouped in a number of subject categories:

a) Sustainability

As this could have been expected, a great number of articles dealt with sustainability and green construction. Dr. Hedley Smyth from Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management (UCL) explained how discussions on green building had matured over time by also including social aspects such as green marketing, health, and safety. Nonetheless, problems such as silo thinking, lack of cooperation among actors, reactive rather than proactive actions, and the mismatch between rhetoric and practice are major hindrances to a real and manifold green building industry according to him.

Filip Elland from Fastighets AB Briggen addressed the importance of a more widespread and active participation from owners and end-users' side in design and construction as a prerequisite for swiftly proceeding beyond mere acquisition of "green" terminology as a fashion statement.

Taking on a socio-economic approach towards sustainability, Ruth Woods from Norwegian organization of SINTEF shed some light on the challenge associated with constructing low-cost and low-energy houses for struggling with social disadvantages and environmental hazards, and at the same time avoiding segregation and its social consequences.

Stakeholders financial relations for eco-city (Yao, 2013)

Yao Yao from the Royal Institute of Technology presented their research team's methodologies and results for cost-benefit analysis of eco-cities. This work was in fact one of the most relevant ones to the main theme of the conference: constructioon economics and organization. It was partly based on financial relations maps, took a number of Chinese sustainable cities as case studies, and eventually deemed construction of eco-cities to be a profitable business.

Ruth Woods' presentation was a historical review of the transitory role of British shopping centers in developing a more sustainable built environment; from outdoors traditional markets and arcaded buildings, through the first generation of department stores with their large concrete structures of the 60's, to more luxurious malls of the 80's and to their more environmental-aware contemporary successors.

b) Success and Efficiency in Construction Projects

Some authors had set their focus on specific building materials and products in their discussions around efficiency in construction. Aberto JR. Lordsleem from the Polytechnique School of Pernambuco University in Brazil talked about his studies on losses of material in construction of concrete building elements. His work did however not cover losses incurred by rework and delay in time. Bjørn Petter Jelle from NTNU presented how they evaluated expected required life time of building products and materials in their laboratory as a clue to problems such as erosion and decay. Such an approach can help saving time and money and enhancing the construction firms' reputation in the long term. The major challenges to overcome are, nevertheless, volatile and unpredictable climate situations, and unknown traits and behaviors of the newly-developed materials and products.

Accelerated climate ageing of wooden samples (Jelle, 2013)

Others had acquired a more holistic approach towards efficiency in construction. Micael Thunberg from Linköpings University, for instance, introduced his methodology for supply chain management (SCM) through business process re-engineering, benchmarking best practices, and analysing process reference models. Coordination is a crucial factor in any supply change management practice according to him. 

A number of  researchers had an even taken a broader perspective in their work. Hallgrim Hjelmbrekke from NTNU contemplated on what success meant to different actors and how this affected strategic goals of the project. Aligning the overall goals of the entire building project with incremental goals of participants and disciplinary teams at each stage is quite often dampened by the fragmented state of the industry and practical difficulties with project requirement management. Balancing diverse criteria such as time, cost, and quality is another challenge in formulation and evaluation of success in a project.

Terttu Vainio from the Technical Research Centre of Finland introduced a case project where several forces of financial crisis, EU directives, and environmental concerns were acquired and translated into the program for a renovation project in Finland. There were even more focused research projects among presented works: Gunnar Lucko from the Catholic University of America presented his proposal for using singularity functions for integrating temporal and financial constraint model of construction projects.

c) Collaboration and Communication

A fraction of contributions tackled collaboration and communication as a major criteria for both defining and achieving success in the project. Siri Blakstad presented a survey on interactions among two internal teams engaged in a design and construction work. She touched upon a very common problem in joint construction projects: diverging terminologies, interests and objectives of the participant groups despite the fact that they were all working towards a mutual goal i.e. creating a well-functioning piece of built environment. Difficulties with describing the required outcomes in business terms, varied and sometimes conflicting priorities of different teams (e.g. energy efficiency vs. construction time), problems in translating spatial demands into physical elements, and mismatch among supplies of one group and demands of the other group were just examples of the negative consequences.

Yao Yao, Micael Thunberg, Susanna Vass, Gunnar Lucko, and me facing towards NTNU

World Building Congress 2013 - 2

As I had promised in an earlier post, here comes a synopsis of the works presented at a selection of the sessions I attended during the World Building Congress 2013. Summaries are grouped according to their subject area rather than the chronological order of presentations:

a) Briefing

Peter Johansson from Jönköping University in Sweden touched on the value of use of IT in the briefing phase. His suggested solutions were DRofus and PTS applications which are based on the concepts of standard rooms and functional requirements. Visualizing and discussing a set of devised solutions early in the design process are essential parts of any efficient briefing process according to him.

b) Design

Bob Giddings from Northumbria University in the UK lectured on architectural design quality evaluation with an example from sheltered houses in North East England. One of the most important issues that he raised was that performance aspects of design alternatives could easily be documented and evaluated, while more qualitative measures such as atmosphere, comfort, and aesthetics cannot be captured with normal tools. In line with this, the lecture by Sebastian Macmillan from Cambridge was focused on evaluating an entire building design project. He presented a report on outcomes of implementation of the method, critical success factor framework, for gauging successfulness of students’ design projects at the Royal College of Art.

c) Procurement & Green Building

WLC minimisation with integrated procurement vs
conventional methods (Murray et all., 2013)

Moving on to the in-between phase in the construction procedure, Alex Murray from the University College London articulated why he believed that an integrated procurement should be considered as a substantial enabler of any whole-life-cost (WLC) estimation approach. He presented the outcomes of his studies on a number of benchmarking methods for evaluating the procurement phase, namely Capex and Opex. Robin Hardy from the University of Canberra looked into procurement from another perspective: in her interpretation, procurement is not merely confined to the stage between design and construction; rather it prevails, in one way or another, during the building’s entire life cycle. There were some amazingly controversial citations in her presentation such as “Sustainable procurement is dependent on skills and competence of the staff rather than established universal routines”; or “Even though procurement is an important stage, it may quite often be a barrier to sustainability”!

This was not the only occasion where the key to a genuine sustainable building practice was traced back to sustainable procurement (also termed as green procurement). Robert Crawford, from the University of Melbourne talked about environmental impacts of the construction supply chain. He put forward an alleged set of tiers of supply chain among which the highest amount of direct energy consumption was asserted to be associated with onsite construction activities. Manufacturing of structural elements, concrete, ceramic, and metal and wood building elements exhibit the biggest potentials for energy optimizing according to Crawford.

In a broader context, Scott Kelting (California Polytechnic State University) notified how global decision-making procedures influenced ubiquity and efficiency of green buildings. His studies encompassed key influences, central visions, and guidelines for green building around the world. A major global challenge is maintaining a satisfactory balance between functionality and environmental friendliness, according to him. Limits to mitigating negative impacts of natural light such as glare and heat is an example. Joseph Lai from Hong Kong Polytechnic University talked about another aspect of green building practices: mandatory reporting of greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. He provided an account of the guidelines for the FM sector in Hong Kong for reporting their CO2 emissions. In this case, reporting was limited to residential and institutional buildings and even this was implemented on a voluntary basis.

d) Building Knowledge Management

BIM Execution Plan Cube (Mitchell, 2013)

As expected, a good number of papers including mine were focused on building knowledge management. Not all of those works had been submitted to the AMIDDS track (Architectural Management and Integrated Design and Delivery Solutions); which was held during the two last days of the congress in the Plaza Hall. Lonny Simonian, for example, presented his research on challenges ahead of implementation of BIM in electrical engineering for producing prefabricated assemblies. A key factor in a more widespread use of such models was more suitability of such models for contractors and more willingness of the owners, he contended. The finding seems to also prevail in other domains of the industry.

Among the papers included in the AMIDDS track, David Mitchell talked about the requirements for a successful 5D BIM practice and emphasized the roe of early implementation of BIM in a design-driven approach. In his second presentation in the form of an exploratory dialogue together with Scott Lambert, Mitchel accentuated advantages of effective involvement of subcontractors in the construction procedure in an appealing. Many things should be made clear in the kick-off meeting of the project including terminology, tools that people use, and how to share savings realized by using BIM, in their opinion.

Will BIM technology be also profitable for small enterprises? This is in fact a very frequent question among AEC practitioners. Matthijs Prins from Delft University of Technology shed some light on this topic. Declaring the fact that 60% of the architectural firms in the Netherlands consist of one or two people, he explained the results of their research on implementation of BIM at small architectural firms. They had based their survey on a level-0-to-4 scale for implementation of BIM. Those who had accomplished more than four projects in BIM were considered as experienced cases. He concluded that the usefulness of BIM for small architectural firms was actually not as low as it was quite often perceived.

Iva Kovacic from Vienna University of Technology also pointed out that construction is an SME-dominated industry with 95 % of firms being constituted of up to five employees. She criticized insufficient education time for AEC practitioners (a two-hour-per-year average education time), expensive software licenses, expensive skilled BIM staff, lack of standards for BIM-oriented planning (in Austria), fees being set for linear processes rather than collaborative methods, and multifarious applications at use. According to her results, there is still extensive need for face-to-face contacts among team members despite all technological progresses.

Information in the Mirror World, with services
for the Real World (Tarandi, 2013)

Tarja Mäkelänien from VTT emphasized the importance of roles such as BIM champion and the need for re-engineering processes for getting the most out of BIM. Geoffrey Booth from Texas A&M University described their sustainable real estate development practice using quadruple net value analysis and BIM. Väino Tarandi (my advisor) introduced the proof-of-concept system for a sustainable urban collaboration hub (SUCH) developed at BIM Collaboration Lab. The system envisions a holistic trans-sectorial, trans-scalar, trans-phasic, and trans-disciplinary spatial knowledge management by means of open-standard life-cycle-support data formats. This offers a wide range of desired functions such as version management and loss-free data transaction across actors and corporations, according to Tarandi.

In search of an understanding of the affordances of BIM in the construction phase, Christoph Merschbrock from the University of Agder in Norway had tapped into tacit knowledge of the practitioners. This was in fact a worthy and detailed report on how diverse capabilities of BIM technologies are met, attained, or dismissed by different AEC actors and firms. Among the multitude of the works on automated building-permit procedure, Eilif Hjelseth from the Norwegian Building Authority explained a recent Norwegian initiative, Byggnett. The paper presented by Johannes Dimyadi from the University of Auckland in New Zealand dealt more or less with the same topic. The key to a fully-automated code-compliance checking practice is developing a standard legal data exchange protocol, according to him.

e) Safety

Among numerous works on safety at construction sites, Helen Lingard from RMIT University talked about methods and indexes for measuring health and safety in construction, in general, as well as their own initiative, multi-level measurement. In another presentation, Kristina Sulankivi from VTT introduced a BIM-based automated safety-checking tool developed jointly with scholars at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The proof-of-concept tool is based on a ruleset that controls the building model for the most common safety issue i.e. falls from height. The approach can be propagated to other sources of risk, according to her. 

World Building Congress 2013

During my thirty-hour rail trip from Brisbane to Cairns, I came across more roof solar panels than any other local Australian feature. I would now prefer to associate this country first and foremost with its vibrant social atmosphere, good wine, good food, sunny days, and welcoming, friendly, and easygoing people rather than kangaroos and koalas! Yet, those exotic ibises with their iconic long curved beaks freely wandering around the city were reminders of the unique flora and fauna of the continent.  

The alluring city of Brisbane hosted this year’s World Building Congress. The event was somehow overshadowed and influenced by recent natural disasters around the world, namely floods in Queensland and New York City and earthquakes as well as the financial crisis. The most concurrent topics among the works presented were resilience, sustainability, safety and security, offsite manufacturing, integrated design and planning, and smart building knowledge management. More or less similar topics have been introduced and discussed in the first series of CIB Research Roadmaps. 

The major theme of the congress, construction and society, was brought up, emphasized, and clarified in concrete terms by the Minister for Housing and Public Works of the Queensland Government, Tim Mander. The eventual goal is to add value to buildings through – among all - innovation, PPP constructs, and whole-life cost analysis, according to him. 

The first keynote speaker, Prof. Martin Fischer from Stanford University communicated their most recent findings on how to simulate numerous possibilities of a construction project before actual construction. The answer to the question “why we come up short in projects?”, in his opinion, can be traced back to organization and prediction. Here comes a list on some other topics Professor Fischer touched on in his talk: the importance of the stage following the design phase and prior to construction, clear-cut clarification of the goals of the project, elimination of uncertainties, on-budget, on-schedule, and quality projects, staff working for the project rather than for the company, continual evaluation and redefinition of the process, manufacturing building elements based on digital models, deployment of laser scanning for post-construction determination of discrepancies, implementing Multidisciplinary Design Optimization method (MDO) for balancing carbon footprint against life cycle costs, using Space Constraint Method (SCM) for evaluating efficiency of use of construction space, and integrating subcontractors in the design team. 

During the afternoon keynote speech of the first day of the congress, Peter Verwer, head of the Property Council of Australia expressed an enthusiastic appraisal of the cities and their pioneering role in our modern societies. Urbanized and connected living areas nurture productivity, he asserted. Urbanization, IT, and globalization are three major contemporary driving forces that should be benefited for creating flourishing and evolving cities, he believed. Nonetheless, bringing the language of technology and that of business closer to each other is an essential requirement for more efficient urban services. 

Later on, during the panel discussion of the first day of the congress, a number of global challenges ahead of the building industry were put forward: 

• Still 30% of construction work is done onsite (on average). 
• Building Information Modeling is quite often comprehended as a technology that customers are reluctant to use. 
• Basic requirements and strategic guidelines for creating economic shelters and modernized settlements seem to diverge extensively. 
• Costs of building are increasing because of the higher costs of the newer technologies. This poses a serious threat to small construction firms. In the Netherlands, for example, 60% of the construction firms of today will vanish away by 2050 
• Costs of operating and maintaining public welfare equipment will double by 2040 due to increasing costs of technologies. 
• Green buildings should be replaced by resilient buildings. 

During the second day’s panel discussion, Carol Le Gall, chief executive director of the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB) notified contemporary challenges in the building industry with regard to optimization of production and consumption of energy, carbon, water, and waste. She continued with a comprehensive report on CSTB’s project for analyzing real-time indoor air quality; LUM’AIR. Prof. Peter Barrett from the University of Salford concluded the session with an inspiring talk to remind a neglected matter of course: what the overall role of the entire building industry is. Research activities in the field, in his opinion, may follow educational, economic, social, or environmental concerns; but they should eventually have a holistic impact and relate to how the buildings affect people. At the same time as agents in the FM sector neglect the impacts of their possessions on the lives of the mankind and simply regard their profession as a business similar to any other profitable affair, our built environment either contributes to health hazards such as Alzheimer, anxiety, and vision problems, or nurtures healthy and thriving societies. Finally, Lyn Beazley shed some light on recent technological achievements realized in the far western Australian port of Perth and Curtain University. The initiative for transforming non-visible parts of the light into energy by using photovoltaic cells and nanotechnology is an outstanding example of their cutting-edge research projects. 

The afternoon keynote speaker of the second day, Brian Krause from Turner BIM gave a ravishing lecture on their most recent developments in the field of BIM technology seasoned with demonstrations of a software solution for BIM-enabled facility management and operations developed at the University of Columbia. He touched on a variety of topics and issues in the field of use of IT for construction including authoring BIM execution plans, evaluation of total cost of ownership (TCO), turning SketchUp into an object-based modeling tool by means of plug-ins, pushing legislative boundaries forward by submitting a 3D safety model to NYC municipality, optimizing clash detection functions of existing applications, use of barcodes for more automated maintenance routines, and promoting lean BIM processes. 

The third day’s keynote speakers, Dr. Wim Bakens and Dr. Shyam Sunder depicted, among all, the CIB’s general research roadmap. Dr. Wim Bakens clarified the necessity of a research roadmap as a glossary of agreed-upon definitions and an overall conceptual model. Contemporary construction research institutes, namely CSIRO, VTT, TNO, bre, and CSTB need to be able to demonstrate that their concerns are relevant, they have access to all members of the community, and are capable of efficient and effective knowledge exchange and  collaboration. Implementation of research in practice is also momentous which calls for a closer contact with the society, industry, and government. He then noticed the fact that there is a tipping point for the percentage of investment in construction out of GNP to secure a positive contribution to development of the society. This could be termed as the built environment’s caring capacity; a concept that is closely intertwined with decline of building and the optimal peak of new construction. He articulated his proposed remedy as, among all, implementing different types of business models for overcoming the declining market, more efficient risk management, and future-oriented, sustainable, resilient, affordable, and adaptive buildings... I will probably provide a summary of other contributions in a separate post later on. 

David Mitchell, Christoph Merschbrock, Eilif Hjelseth, and me got together in a bar in Brisbane's South Bank before the last night congress dinner