THE CHALLENGE
Effective change management within construction projects is made challenging by the adversarial nature of contractual relationships. Change within a construction project typically refers to alterations to the scope, function, design or delivery of the facility/asset.
Such changes are continuous during a project’s lifecycle and the information necessary to manage them is often incomplete. This is because the information is fragmented across multiple data environments and times.
A significant search effort is therefore required to make informed decisions on a change. The burden on project resources and individuals involved in this search often leads to inadequate decisions being made. This has shown to be a major source of risk that has contributed to lost revenue to the contractor.
MTC'S SOLUTION
The proposed solution is a knowledge management system that assists project change decision makers. This system will help by:
- Centralising project data by providing access to data stored within the projects various data environments.
- Automating knowledge generation with AI and natural language processing.
- Using this knowledge to find and link change related information and documents throughout a project’s lifecycle.
- Visualising project change in a way that makes locating relevant information and assessing the impact easier on decision makers.
THE OUTCOME
- Intelligent models able to automatically process data as it appears in the system and generate insights via natural language processing.
- Insights to link related documents via their semantic similarity, dates, stakeholders etc.
- Insights to identify and highlight potential new changes and issues which need to be tracked.
- A web-based user interface that allows users to locate and visualize project change related information.
BENEFITS TO CONSTRUCTION
- Supporting decision making related to changes through better access to information and improved traceability.
- Reduced direct costs and time to manage changes.
- Helping change managers predict the impact of proposed changes to reduce overall project costs.
- Enhanced collaborative working relationships and client transparency.
