February 10, 2012

London & District Construction Association to study information and communication

LONDON, Ont.

The London & District Construction Association (LDCA) is embarking on a groundbreaking project that will assess the use of information and communication technology (ICT) throughout the entire five phases of a construction project.

Work on this project will be undertaken at the National Research Council Canada’s Centre for Computer-assisted Construction Technologies in London, with guidance from the LDCA’s design liaison committee which has representation from the local contracting and design community.

The project will assemble an entire consulting team made up of a general contractor, sub-contractors and a commissioning contractor from the LDCA membership. This team will create a baseline analysis of software, platforms, communication devices and techniques being used by each party in the process.

“This analysis is much broader than BIM (Building Information Modeling), much more comprehensive, and to our knowledge has never been put under a microscope to find redundancy, crossover or bottlenecks in the process across all disciplines,” said LDCA executive director Derek Smith.

In 2009, the LDCA was the first construction association in Canada to launch digital construction training for its member companies when it opened the BIM Café in London.

The ultimate goal of the ICT project is to identify challenges and propose solutions to improve productivity for small and medium-sized enterprises in the construction sector. Smith said it is anticipated that the first phase of investigation and baseline analysis will get under way in mid-March and take well over six months to complete.

The main deliverable is expected to be a report and case study that will ultimately be shared with the Canadian Construction Association (CCA), as part of CCA’s foray into developing a proposed research institute.

The CCA has made it a priority to look into strengthening its relationship and collaboration with academia and research organizations.

“Our board of directors believes that as an integrated association member of CCA, leveraging our local relationships and delivering quantifiable data and solutions to our collective member companies assists in moving the industry forward,” Smith said.

He said Canada is lagging behind other countries in ICT, especially in construction.

DCN NEWS SERVICES

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