Can working procedure be supported at the building site by the use of ICT
Student thesis: Master Thesis and HD Thesis
- Søren Hauge Krabbe
4. term, Management in the Building Industry, Master (Master Programme)
This master’s thesis concerns the writers master’s degree in building management
at the The Faculties of Engineering, Science and Medicine, Aalborg
University. The master’s thesis is made in cooperation with a medium-size
Danish contracting company and the supervisors are professor Per Christiansson
and associate professor Kjeld Svidt.
The building industry has a reputation for being conservative and an industry
which is hard to transform. A building project is an unique project
constructed and build by a project group which consists of different operators
for each project. After the building project is done, the project group
is broken down. This makes the repetition effect difficult to maintain and in
the end the quality of the building project is also difficult to maintain. A bad
quality in the building industry equals spending a lot of money on reparations.
If there were an opportunity to catch and solve these mistakes before
they appear it would be better. More use of information- and communication
technology (ICT) is such an opportunity.
An analysis of need has been conducted among five employees at the construction
company focusing on their need for more ICT in their daily work
and whether there are any specific ICT-systems they could use. The analysis
ended up with a problem statement:
1. What functions can be supported and improved in the quality assurance
process with help from an ICT system?
2. Are there other working and communication procedures that can be
supported and improved with help from ICT systems?
Two tests and evaluations have been made with two different ICT systems.
The first ICT-system is a quality assurance (QA) system which can help
release the employees from keeping the paper QA material up to date by
making the photo documentation more easy. This can be done by the use of
a PDA where the employee uses the PDA to collect and catch the quality
assurance and the collected data can be uploaded to a project hard drive.
Photos can be taken by the PDA and uploaded to a project hard drive as well.
The other ICT-system which is tested and evaluated is a system that gives
the opportunity to communicate with a tablet computer. Thereby time can
be saved on transport between the construction site and the site hut. With
the tablet computer the employee can have access to all the drawing material,
project material, models and it is possible to communicate via mail, chat
and webcam via mobile Internet.
Language | Danish |
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Publication date | 2009 |
Publishing institution | Institut for produktion |