Customer stories

Driving digital transformation in construction, delivering months of work in minutes

During the design and build of a £3 billion underground passenger railway in Kuala Lumpur, MMC Gamuda digitised their entire operation with Viewpoint for Field View – a site tool designed for complex construction projects.

This gave them a wealth of data that Sempre has been able to turn into valuable business insight; building automated reports that have saved months of work and helping the organisation innovate ahead of its competitors.

Introducing MMC Gamuda

MMC Gamuda is a joint venture between two of Malaysia’s largest construction groups. It is responsible for the £3 billion design, tunnelling and underground construction of multiple railway stations for the Klang Valley Mass Rapid Transport Project, a long-term project to improve infrastructure in Kuala Lumpur.

The challange: untapped insights

MMC Gamuda is on a mission to digitise their entire underground railway construction project. To do this they’ve adopted Viewpoint for Field View on a mass scale.

Thousands of employees and contractors, from design consultants to electricians, have
replaced their paperwork with digital reporting across everything from engineering drawings to inspection tasks.

The result is a single version of the truth and improved efficiency across this complex project.

Field View also gave them a goldmine of untapped insight and possibilities.

They knew if they could extract this data to answer critical business questions and guide
decision making, it could transform the way they work completely.

As Martin Angus, Information Manager, explains;

“Data literacy is still new in the construction industry but it’s becoming the norm. When you read about the evolution of smart cities, what they’re really talking about is the ability to ask questions of data sets that they were never able to do before. And then make judgements based on facts as opposed to estimates”.

How Sempre became involved

As the leading Field View partner for data integration management and visualisation, Sempre was the only choice for the analytics stage of this digital transformation project.

Along with Sempre’s technical capabilities, they won the project based on their previous construction expertise.

Martin Angus explains;

“We chose Sempre because they are both a subject matter expert and understand construction, so we knew they could build software that would truly address our unique challenges”.

What happened: unlocking hidden potential

Sempre travelled to Malaysia to run a series of workshops with different MMC Gamuda business units.

Using their deep understanding of the construction industry, Sempre explored their day-to-day needs and challenges, with questions such as:

  • What do you most need to know?
  • Do you suspect some of your contractors are repeating mistakes?
  • Where do you feel that you may be duplicating effort?
  • Where are we wasting time and money?
  • Where are the worst inefficiencies?

To address these, Sempre implemented its cloud-based Field View Analytics solution. This allowed them to dive into the issues, find answers and begin driving continuous improvement within the organisation. MMC Gamuda soon began to realise that the combination of Field View and Sempre Analytics could solve problems that they didn’t
even know existed.

For instance, they needed to be able to standardise over a million assets. Using the new
solution they’re able to do this in minutes, rather than weeks. This will also be invaluable when they handover the assets and data to their client.

The outcome: exponential efficiency and innovation

Working with Sempre has increased the speed and efficiency of the reporting process, saving considerable money, time and effort. Whereas Field View could report on one site at a time, with Sempre they’re now able to report holistically across 17 sites at a time.

It has also been transformative for their award-winning Health and Safety Department, critical in a business that prides themselves on their exceptionally high safety standards.

Whereas the Health and Safety Director used to spend a week out of every month compiling reports, now they’re sent to his desktop in minutes.

This saves him 3 months of work – and salary – a year. Most importantly, this allows him more time to focus on identifying issues, not reporting on them.

As Nick Morecock, BIM Manager, explains;

“We’re now standardising across our business units, controlling our data with more visibility and transparency about what’s actually going on”.

Orges Lesha, BIM Standards Lead, adds;

“If we see something that is not right or has changed, we can very quickly pinpoint where in which field form out of hundreds or thousands of field forms, the problem occurred. This was impossible before Sempre was involved”.

Improving the quality of data will help the organisation to make better, informed decisions.

Driving standards, driving growth

Another important benefit has been the way in which the organisation has evolved, Nick
comments:

“We’ve increased the value of our ‘human capital’ by training thousands of employees to
work with digital processes. It’s all part of the digital story and digital journey of the business. The upskilling and training of the people is essential because if you don’t innovate you aren’t going to survive, period”.

This is something that has already helped them attract new business ahead of competitors and will continue to drive the growth of the organisation, along with driving change in the industry as a whole.

As the project continues and the organisation grows, they’re continuing to find untapped benefits from the solution, as Nick explains;

“We’re driving efficiencies, we’re driving standards, we’re driving compliance; gaining visibility and transparency on our data and activities in real-time. We couldn’t have done this 18 months ago, because we didn’t know what was possible. Now we know what’s possible, it’s exponential”.

What they said

“For me, the best thing about working with Sempre was Paul’s ability to be able to help people that don’t understand this topic, translate what they have in their mind into something that they need and can see. That’s an incredibly strong skill.”

Martin Angus Information Manager