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"Kaiser had completed an analysis that indicated they were losing approximately $8 million per month per hospital as a result of sending clients to non-Kaiser hospitals. Therefore, the critical engineering problem the Stanford team was to focus on was the use VDC tools to remove some of the uncertainty in the project schedule duration and to identify ways to improve the overall schedule for the template hospital. "
Related links:
HMH broke ground on the $120-million Kaiser Santa Rosa Hospital North Tower Expansion project
What can you and your company do now to prepare yourselves for the growth that is coming when the cyclic AEC industry starts its next upturn? How do you stay competitive with a lean staff until the upturn starts? How will you respond to the fierce competition for new jobs when the upturn starts? How will you service the business you win when owner and contractor staffs have shrunk?
Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) is the use of multi-disciplinary performance models of design-construction projects, including the Product (i.e., facilities), Work Processes, and Organization of the project. The CIFE Summer Program will include discussions by Stanford faculty and a number of successful industry practitioners on how you can now use VDC methods and tools today and in the future. Companies find value because VDC can dramatically improve the quality and win-rate of proposals, increase the effectiveness of design-construction teams and deliver higher value to clients. Please see the Summer Program website for complete details.
The Stanford Virtual Design and Construction Summer Program will introduce you to theory, methods and the hands-on process to model the project design, construction, operation, and economic impact to support business objectives. Specifically, students will learn about the following kinds of tools: 3D CAD and product modeling, project process planning and cost estimation, organization analysis and 4D (3D plus time) animation, economic impact analysis of both cost and value of technology investment, and use of business metrics to achieve measurable business results.
In the program, among many other industry speakers, you will hear:
For students interested in developing first-hand operational knowledge of these tools, the Summer Program is the first part of a Certificate Program in Virtual Design and Construction.
Early registration benefits are available through May 25th. Plan on joining us for this exciting program and make use of your CIFE membership benefits!!
This year, twelve projects were developed and presented by an unprecedented twenty different investigators from the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Science, Education, Mechanical Engineering and Urban Planning.
INVESTIGATORS TITLE OF PROJECT AWARDS AWARD AMOUNT Law, Weiderhold, Liu, Cheng Composition of Engineering Web Services Fruchter, Krawinkler, Yin GEAR: Giga Enterprise Archive RECALL Björnsson, Taylor Bridging the Innovation Gap in the AEC Industry
$40,000
Fischer, Akbas
Automated Detection
and Updating of Construction Activity Progress from Time-Lapse Images
$30,000
Fischer, Kunz, Nash,
Garcia
Metrics to Assess how
Groupware Technology Supports Engineering
Levitt,
Koza, KHosraviani
Organizational
Design Optimization Using Genetic Algorithms/Programming
$40,000
Billington
Modeling the Impact
of New Structural Systems and Materials on Construction Practice for
Reduced Life-cycle Costs
$25,000
Miranda, Kang
Mathematical Models
for Visualizing the Virtual Construction
Fischer, Kim
Temporary Structure
Planning Generation Using Feature-based Modeling
$25,000
Björnsson, Ekström
Information
Technology and Supply Strategy in AEC
Fischer, Kam
The Implementation
and Testing of an iRoom Decision Dashboard
Leifer, Nieh, Jann
Mechatronic-Architecture
The Seed Research Selection Committee consisted of the member delegates at the Technical Advisory Committee Meeting and Ed Divita, former Ph.D. student at Stanford and Senior VP of Discovery Land Company. These were difficult decisions, but we trust that the outcome will be best for our members, the faculty, students and CIFE's research program. Twelve proposals were submitted this year. Five projects were given funds totalling $160,000.
The TAC committee gave specific suggestions to each of the investigators. General comments included the necessity to understand industrial practice as well as theoretical framework as part of the point of departure; attention to the proper role of university research to focus on more fundamental development versus the role of industry in doing more applied development, and the need today to consider all research from a global perspective.
John Kunz taught a class on Virtual Design and Construction (CEE143/243) during the winter of 2003 . Students participated in one of four class projects provided by CIFE member companies Obayashi Corporation, Swinterton Builders subsidiary HMH General Contractors and Construction Managers, Walt Disney Imagineering, and Webcor Builders. The objective of the mini-internship was for students to present their models of the product, process and organization of their projects, work with sponsor company engineers to elaborate the models, and present their work to anyone who was interested. A measure of the success of the process is that the students collectively were invited to present their work to over 250 engineers in the sponsoring companies.
Below is a summary of one of the mini-internship projects. In each mini-internship, the student team put in a collective sum of about 100 hours to build their product, process and organization models. The success of the student teams is a testament to how good the Stanford students are. Their success also points to the fact that the VDC tools have matured to the point where capable engineers can do highly valuable work very quickly. An important side note is that, at the beginning of the quarter, most of the students had no experience with any of the tools. Within the ten-week quarter, while taking three other demanding classes, they learned enough about both the mechanics and the methodology of the tools to do valuable work.
HMH General Contractors and Construction Managers, a division of Swinerton, Inc., offered an innovative project for the CEE143/243 mini-internship team. The Stanford class team, comprised of PhD students Arto Kiviniemi, Xiaoshan Pan, Calvin Kam and John Taylor, met in with HMH representative Dale Davis to discuss the VDC process and to set the scope for the project in February 2003. The project on which the team was to focus was a "template" hospital project HMH was hired to complete for Kaiser Permanente.
The project
was to build 21 Kaiser Hospitals over the next decade using a single
innovative
template design. Kaiser had
completed an analysis that indicated they were losing approximately $8
million per month per hospital as a result of sending clients to
non-Kaiser hospitals. Therefore, the critical engineering problem the
Stanford team was to focus on was the use VDC tools to remove some of
the uncertainty in the project schedule duration and to identify ways
to improve the overall schedule for the template hospital.
Figure 1 - 3-D
Product Model
At the
mini-internship project scoping meeting, the team met with Curtis
Johnson, who led the project for HMH, and a team of five other
stakeholders. It was
agreed that the team should focus on schedule issues associated with
the initial construction phases to compare
alternative building methods. The team built 3-D product models using
ArchiCAD and Architectural Desktop (Figure 1) to represent key
construction activities in these phases.The team then imported the
process model (Microsoft Project) from HMH into SimVision (Figure 2)
along with the organization model described by HMH to simulate and
predict schedule length and schedule growth for the alternative
construction methods.
Figure
2 - Process & Organization Model
Finally, the
team built 4-D production models (Figure 3) combining the product and
process models for the various construction alternatives. The VDC
models that the team created
provided an integrated view and
enabled the team to identify risk areas and relative durations for the
proposed construction alternatives. The mini-internship team will meet
with HMH to discuss the VDC modeling results in the coming weeks. The
team believes the stakeholder team will find significant value in VDC
tools that enable them to simulate the project "virtually" to predict
schedule risks and durations for construction alternatives before
construction begins.
Figure 3 - 4-D
Production Model
TR 145: "PERSPECTORS: Automating the Construction and Coordination of Multidisciplinary 3D Design Representations" John Haymaker, Ben Suter, John Kunz, Martin Fischer (April 2003, 10 pages, pdf file size: 1,351KB)
We formalize a multidisciplinary project model as a directed acyclic graph of dependencies between representations. For the nodes of this graph, we formalize a generic representation, called a "perspective," which contains "features" that describe the design for a specific task. These features contain data types such as 3D surfaces, lines, and points, as well as relationships to other features. For the arcs of this graph, we formalize a generic reasoning mechanism, called a "perspector," which analyzes any number of "source perspectives" to produce one "dependent perspective." Engineers from different disciplines use perspectors to transform source perspectives into dependent perspectives that are useful for their tasks. Dependent perspectives serve as source perspectives for other dependent perspectives, leading to a self-organizing graph of dependencies between perspectives. We describe this approach with two multidisciplinary engineering problems from the Walt Disney Concert Hall (WDCH). Perspectors and perspectives enable engineers to use design representations that share a common theoretical foundation. They allow engineers to automatically generate task-specific representations from representations produced by other engineers.
WP 078: "Communication, Trust and Performance: The Influence of Trust on Performance in A/E/C Cross-functional, Geographically Distributed Work" Roxanne Zolin, Renate Fruchter, Pamela Hinds (May 2003; 39 pages Download PDF, Size: 474KB)
The purpose of this paper is to report the results of the CIFE research study of trust in cross-functional, geographically distributed A/E/C teams. Cross-functional, geographically distributed teams provide the construction industry with great advantages by bringing diverse skills to bear on problems and projects that span traditional organizational functions. Although companies are quickly adopting the model of cross-functional, geographically distributed teams, little is known about the new social environment that this creates for team members. A major challenge in such teams is the development of interpersonal trust between team members. The objective of this research is to determine the influence of geographic distribution, cross-functionality on communication, interpersonal trust and individual performance between two team members, called a dyad, in an Architecture, Engineering and Construction (A/E/C) industry setting. Our research questions were: What are the key predictors of interpersonal trust in distributed A/E/C teams? And how does interpersonal trust influence individual performance?
We hypothesized that trust is more difficult in cross-functional, geographically distributed dyads because of the different disciplinary perspectives and the lack of face-to-face interaction available when working at a distance. We also hypothesize that trust improves the work process performance of both members of the dyad, i.e. the trustor and the trustee, leading to greater work outputs, such as less time, less cost and higher quality.
To test these hypotheses, we studied 224 dyads of team members in 6 design/build teams working on large building projects in the USA. The data collection was based on two types of questionnaires. We gathered individual performance data from the Project Managers. We then asked the team members about their trust relationships with four team members chosen at random from their team. The data was analyzed using correlations, multivariate regressions and structural equation modeling.
As expected we found that team members who were geographically distributed had less personal communication, which was associated with lower perceived trustworthiness and lower trust. We were surprised to find that cross-functional dyads had higher perceived trustworthiness and higher trust. We surmise that something akin to "Professional courtesy" may operate in these cases. High trust increased the work process performance of both the trustor and the trustee and resulted in higher output performance for both. Further longitudinal research is needed to determine if these relationships are significant over time. The implications of these findings for members and managers of cross-functional geographically distributed teams are mentioned briefly but will be addresses in more detail in a subsequent publication.