Departmental coordination in distributed environment through Nirmanith

Challenges for departments and partners to collaborate

The teams are unable to collaborate effectively because departmental applications are implemented without factoring in the integration needs of construction projects. This can be better understood through examples.

Very often in construction projects, we find differences in how engineering and procurement departments interpret initial engineering drawings to extract items to be procured. As illustrated in figure (1), engineering department provides the schematic drawings and notes to procurement. However this is done in a manner that induces procurement to interpret the information while preparing purchase orders. This leads to variance (Delta A) between what is specified Vs what is requested to be procured. Further, there may also be variance (Delta B) between what is requested to be procured Vs what is actually received from the supplier at site office. The level of details at which engineer prepares estimates is different from the level of detail at which procurement prepares the tender schedules. When changes are made to line items at tender schedule, these changes are not reflected back in the estimates, as they are not linked to each other. As illustrated in the diagram, changes happening in design and engineering drawings don’t flow in timely manner to make corresponding adjustments in the procurement process.

How do we address this challenge in Nirmanith?

Nirmanith is a web-based solution supporting the entire life cycle of construction projects starting from project initiation through design, procurement and construction by providing a single platform for everyone to communicate and share information with others. The construction processes are routed through different departments such as engineering, procurement, finance etc. in the order of their flow.

For example, when design is complete and components assigned, a bill of materials is populated which is used to generate tender schedule. Any change in engineering specifications or quantity can be easily extracted as an amendment to the original specification. As a result, design specifications and the actual items procured are always in sync. The product also offers flexibility of maintaining different level of details between estimation and tender schedule. However, the line item details of tender schedule can very much be tied back to line items of estimates. Hence, any change in tender line items is automatically reflected in the estimate. This facility is also extended to the contract stage. Any change in the actual procurement is automatically reflected in the line item estimate.

Nirmanith enables to management to have consolidated view of the actual progress of construction project in relation to “spend to date” on the project. It extracts information pertaining to the actual status of various tasks within the project schedule as obtained from the site. When finance department views the billing schedule information, they can very well co-relate that with the actual project progress updates from site office.