Procure Project Homepage
ICT at work in the LSE Procurement Chain
Esprit project 29948
Procure was a deployment project funded under the fourth framework:
“Information and Communications
technologies at work within the Large Scale Engineering Procurement
Chain”
The UK partners are Taylor Woodrow, Corus Group, Leeds University, and the Bayswater Institute. See the international website for details of other partners in Finland and Germany.
The goal of Procure is to take a significant but achievable step forward in the application of available ICT to the Large Scale Engineering (LSE) construction industry.
The partners in Procure will include a client, three types of engineering contractor, a major product supplier and an equipment supplier. All have experience of working collaboratively in advanced ICT development. The research partners are well experienced having between them expertise in information modelling, software implementation and social science.
Industry change is happening and larger clients and engineering contractors are establishing new patterns of working within the current industry structure but which will evolve considerably in the future. These strategies acknowledge the vital role of ICT in supporting information flow across the many interfaces and information sharing to eliminate interfaces. However the technology appears complex and its application difficult to picture for LSE practitioners.
The basis of Procure is the partners’ belief that sufficient ICT is now available to achieve deployment in real projects, with care. Placing industrially untried technology into working environments has risks for the real project and the technologies themselves if rejected. The industrial partners believe that the risks can be reduced in a number of practical ways to a level that is acceptable.
The approach of Procure is to define scenarios and specify the supporting ICT for deployment within the first year and to agree the real projects for the pilots (including contractual and legal issues). The workforce engaged in, or influencing, the pilots will be trained according to their individual needs and then the three pilots will be carried out each over a period of 15 months with staggered starting dates. Throughout, the human-centred aspects in the design of systems and the planning for deployment, implementation, usage and management, will be studied to improve the success of the three pilots and to inform the Best Practice guidelines.
The technologies in Procure are expected to include Product Data Technology (PDT), Electronic Commerce (EC), Product Data Management (including Electronic Document Management), Workflow, distributed information services, the WWW and object-oriented applications software. The methodologies adopted will accord with those of ISO-10303 (STEP), UN/EDIFACT, the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI) and the Object Management Group (OMG).
The main ‘products’ of the Procure project will be the improved definition of the overall Procurement process; a scenario for distributed integration (i.e. working together apart); a deployment methodology which takes into account the human factors; and the identification of protocols and standards that can support the integration of the process.
The main deliverables of the Procure project will be three complementary industry pilots. Together these will cover the building lifecycle of real construction projects in the areas of industrial and commercial buildings.
The major objectives of the Procure project are:
To show that applying advanced ICT in the LSE industry is possible, is widely applicable, is scaleable to company and project size and can be introduced into the industry’s flexible structure of project Procurement.
To deploy successfully the methodology and supporting software in or alongside live industrial projects.
To quantify the benefits of the industrial deployments to participants in the process.
To stimulate the SME software industry serving LSE to accelerate and broaden new product development.
To establish a methodology for deploying ICT technology in the LSE industry and to prepare “Best Practice” guidelines on the approach.
To identify and address the issue of reducing the human and social obstacles to widespread industrial deployment.
To use Procure as an opportunity for external national projects and industry initiatives to collaborate with a significant “parent” project.
To provide guidance based on experience of specific future research to fill technology gaps.
|
Company |
Name |
Notes |
Telephone |
email |
|
Taylor Woodrow |
David Leonard |
Project Manager |
020 8575 4888 |
david.leonard@taywood.co.uk |
|
|
Graham Anderson |
UK Pilot Manager |
020 8575 4262 |
graham.anderson@taywood.co.uk |
|
|
Roger McAnoy |
Research Manager |
020 8575 4857 |
roger.mcanoy@taywood.co.uk |
|
|
Jeff Stephens |
IT R+D |
020 8575 4626 |
jeff.stephens@taywood.co.uk |
|
|
Robert Preston |
Yarm |
01642 781758 |
robert.preston@taywood.co.uk |
|
|
Richard Harrison |
object modelling |
01325 385673 |
richard.harrison@taywood.co.uk |
|
|
Simon Ekblom |
project websites |
? |
simon.ekblom@taywood.co.uk |
|
Corus Group |
Colin Harper |
Primary Contact |
01709 825528 |
colin.harper@corusgroup.com |
|
|
Colin Davies |
STEP |
01709 825298 |
colin.davies@corusgroup.com |
|
|
Alan Griffin |
Navisworks |
01709 825508 |
allan.griffin@corusgroup.com |
|
|
David Shaw |
Archicad |
01709 825303 |
david.shaw@corusgroup.com |
|
Leeds University |
Alastair Watson |
Primary Contact |
0113 2332822 |
|
|
|
Mehdi Davoodi |
Working Contact |
0113 2332317 |
|
|
Bayswater Institute |
Lisl Klein |
Primary Contact |
020 7229 2729 |
|
|
|
Emily Hutchinson |
Working Contact |
020 7229 2729 |
bayins@globalnet.co.uk |
|
Graham Howarth |
Primary Contact |
01924 811000 |
grahamh@sarcophagus.co.uk |
|
|
|
Sean Hodgson |
Technical Contact |
01924 811059 |
seanh@sarcophagus.co.uk |
DocLink is an information sharing specification designed for use within project-centric industries such as construction. It defines a standard means of automatically transferring project documents, together with their associated meta-data, between corporate-level document management systems and project-level information systems.
DocLink provides an effective solution to an industrial need that is currently emerging as a consequence of three related trends:
(1) The relentless increase in the use of information technology in the production of all types of project document.
(2) Growing use of document management systems within companies involved in construction projects.
(3) The introduction of project web sites (also known project Extranets) as the means of distributing documents between all the participants in a project.
Trend (1) is has now reached the point where significant transformations in the way the construction sector operates are occurring. Trend (2) is a natural response to trend (1) and currently is more apparent within the larger companies. Formal document management systems are being introduced to replace traditional paper-centric approaches but provide companies with a strategic path towards knowledge management. While document management systems are now relatively mature they are also a generic tool. Construction companies are thus installing document management systems from different vendors.
Trend (3) is also a response to trend (1). It is particularly interesting as Internet and web-site technologies are being mobilised specifically to support the extensive project-centric collaboration that takes place within construction projects. While the functionality of different vendors project web sites vary, their core function is to act as a library that provides each participant in a project with appropriate (i.e. controlled) access to the totality of the project documents. Thus an essential characteristic is that they are accessible by all members of the project team. For this reason a web-browser is universally employed as the primary means by which project participants up-load documents to, and down-load documents from, the project web site. The market for project web sites is still immature, with the inevitable result that many different vendors systems are currently being promoted.
While a web-browser interface is ideal for human users, it causes serious practical problems for any company that is employing a corporate document management system. For example, to issue a set of drawings, a human would need to check-out each drawing from the corporate system and then upload them to the project web site. This is a costly manual process in which the manual re-entry of the meta-data about each drawing is error-prone and no meaningful audit trail will be created in the document management system.
DocLink defines a universal vendor-independent means by which a document management system can, subject to authority, interact directly and automatically with any compliant project web site to allow the transfer of documents and associated meta-data in either direction. In the absence of the Doclink standard, any company with a corporate document management system would face the (infeasible) task of implementing a one-off interface to the project web site employed for each project in which it was involved.
The DocLink specifications define a suite of modular vendor-independent transactions in which the project web site acts as the “server” and the corporate document management system as the “client”. The transactions are easily implemented using XML technology. As such, they offer the vendors of project websites an inexpensive means of meeting their client’s needs. Similarly, they offer a practical solution to any company that is involved in multiple projects and needs to automate interaction with multiple project web sites.
The DocLink specifications are available thus.