A SINGAPORE GOVERNMENT INITIATIVE TO ENHANCE THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY THROUGH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

The construction industry is considered a highly fragmented industry as compared to the other industries. Significant low productivity growth, high dependence of foreign workers, cost and time overruns, conflicts and disputes, resulting in claims, mitigation and time consuming litigation, limited integration of information or data and standard of practices resulting in inefficiency of the building processes and poor quality control in the products of construction are prevalent of the Singapore construction industry. In the wake of the fragmentation in the industry, the Construction 21 Steering committee recommended 6 strategic thrusts to re‐invent the construction industry and the first of the 6 strategic thrust promotes the use of IT in the industry to enhance efficiency and encouraging good practices and standards through formulation and enforcement of codes of conduct. In 2001, the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) launched CORENET (COnstruction and Real Estate NETwork), which provided a platform and opportunity to increase the level of integration among the different disciplines and processes by improving the flow of information within the industry. A series of IT initiative was launched for the construction industry which provided as a platform to bring about a performance and quality driven construction industry that will enable to reduce labour intensive processes and improve on efficiency which contributes to the delivery of integrated and high performance buildings with the respect to the needs of industry players. Furthermore, it is the best practices and approaches from the design stage to construction stage of the building and finally to the management of the life cycle of the building. A comparison of the Information Technology initiatives taken up by Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan in their respective Construction Industries is made, and where the Singapore systems stand in this competitive I.T. era discussed.