Kalyan's Musings

2003-11-20T22:45:00.000-05:00

Back after a hiatus....
Between work, vacation, personal developments at the home front, and laziness, I have been in a hiatus for about two months. But I think it is now time to revive it and start writing again. So, watch for more regular columns in this space....

2003-09-19T14:31:00.000-04:00

3D Projections?
Several companies have tried to come with a number of options to project 3D images. The applications are numerous and of course my favorite will be in the area of A/E/C. I think there is REAL value in projecting a virtual building before putting up the real one for customers (owners) to see what they are getting. This is the future of WYSIWIG in construction. Well, now there is one company that may not have quite done it yet, but is close. The company called IO2 Technology has come up with a display it calls Heliodisplay that projects images in 3D on a 2D planar surface that is in air! Yes, there are projecting in air. They claim to do so by modifying a film of air molecules. There is a demo to be staged in various cities including one in Cambridge MA on Nov 14th. I'll be sure to make it if I am free.

2003-09-10T14:38:00.000-04:00

TOC vs APS
In an email discussion group (CMSIG) there was a discussion around the differences between TOC (theory of constraints) and APS (advanced planning and scheduling). Here is the summary of the discussion:

TOC is a continuous improvement management philosophy whereas APS is the software implementation behind it
TOC is a process whereas APS is a tool that can model various, but typically TOC processes
APS tools are near useless or appear too constricting for businesses unless there are (TOC) processes are being implemented within the business practice as well
APS systems use various algorithms to create 'optimal' solutions, but obviously the effectiveness of the solutions are a function of the effectiveness of the models i.e., TOC
The limitation of APS is that they form a layer on top of ERP systems and 'expect' ERP data to be accurate to work efficiently. In other words, they are a mathematical purity that do not effectively work in real world
TOC has various approaches for various industries:
- Manufacturing or Production - Drum-Buffer-Rope
- Logistics or Replenishment - Rapid Replenishment
- Project Management - Multi-Project Model (Critical Chain is a component of this)
- Product Development - Multi-Project Model (Critical Chain is a component of this)
Good references are:
- Goldratt's Necessary But Not Sufficient (explains APS in the context of TOC)
- Goldratt's It's Not Luck (for rapid replenishment)
- Synchronous Management (for rapid replenishment)
- Goldratt's The Race (for DBR)
- Goldratt's The Goal (for DBR)
- The Manufacturer's Guide to Implementing TOC (how to implement DBR)
- Goldratt's The Haystack Syndrome (how to implement DBR)

Interesting discussion and all good points. Even for CSCM, it is crucial that processes be changed for tools to work effectively. But there is a dearth of literature lacking in construction TOC processes and implementation guide. The lean folks are working on some of it, but there is still a big need for tools and guides.

2003-09-10T13:07:00.000-04:00

The Aesthetic Imperative
Nice article that summarizes the underlying economics behind successful business. Summary?

We must abandon our prejudices regarding the sources of economic value. The production of wealth comes not simply from labor or raw materials or even intellectual brilliance. It comes from new ways to give people what they want. By matching creativity and desire, the economy will renew itself.

I agree. The construction indusry today is hurting with wastage because they do not have any tools (or processes) to better manage their system. That's what construction supply chain management all about!

2003-09-10T13:01:00.000-04:00

Good source for Entrepreneurs
Another website worth reading and keeping up on, sporadically: http://www.entreworld.org/

2003-09-08T17:12:00.000-04:00

References for SCM
Looking for information on supply chain management. Here is your first stop: http://www.scm-dip.com

2003-09-08T13:34:00.000-04:00

Open Source Business Models
With the recent advent of linux OS and evangalising of open source software by giants like IBM, HP, and Sun, open source software is increasingly starting to look like the wave of the future that will unseat Microsoft. But is software really free? Can a company make money by writing open source software? How can the developer community sustain the quality of open source software. A few issues disscussed in Commercializing Open Source Software

2003-09-02T22:00:00.000-04:00

New blog to add to list of reading
Just found a blog called ventureblog. Should make it a habit of reading it to see what VCs have to say about startups, their environment, etc.

2003-08-27T15:45:00.000-04:00

Sheeps Laws of the Universe
Read this in the CMSIG discussion group. It is the story of a man named Dee Hock. His story is interesting but too long for this forum. He had made a small town bank VERY successful and was brought into corporate headquarters as a vunderkind. He says it was like throwing a sheep to the wolves, and 2 years later he was out on the street. From that experience he developed the following 3 "Sheeps Laws of the Universe."

Everything has intended and unintended cosequences. Intended consequences may or may not happen but the unintended consequences ALWAYS happen.
Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex, intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple, stupid behavior.
Everything is its opposite, particularly competition and cooperation. Neither can rise to its highest potential unless seamlessly blended with the other. Either without the other swiftly becomes dangerous and destructive.

2003-08-22T15:09:00.000-04:00

Excel and Project for advanced planning?
Microsoft Office productivity suite has long been well entrenched in the business world. Excel is an ubiqutuous tool used from shop floor scheduler to CEO for data manipulation and analysis. The sheer flexibility offered by the tool is both boon and bane. Here are a couple of MRP/ERP systems that have been developed on Microsoft tools:

Production Scheduling System for < $500: http://www.production-scheduling.com/index.asp
Project Planning System for ~ $100: http://www.advanced-projects.com/index.htm

Now, with Office 2003 and InfoPath (or XML integration) into the Office suite of products, Microsoft has a strong foundation to drive SCM systems to be developed for various verticals (including construction) on the Microsoft platform. The advantages are obvious - everybody knows them and probably has these products, there is no learning curve. Cost and Microsoft do not go together, so am not sure cost is an advantage. I am positive OpenOffice will catch up with the Microsoft innovations soon and then cost can be added to the OpenOffice quiver. If we go to folks with non-consumption, then the ease-of-use (comparable to Office suite) should help bring in the office advantages as well.

2003-08-21T17:18:00.000-04:00

New websites of interest
Came across a few websites that are relevant and might be of interest to those interested in construction, IT, supply chain management in construction, etc. Will add more as they come available in my searching/surfing.

Construction Informatics: http://itc.fgg.uni-lj.si/
Construction IT Journal: http://www.itcon.org
Center for Integrated Facility Engineering, Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/group/CIFE/
Lean Construction Institute: http://www.leanconstruction.org
International Lean Construction Institute: http://www.vtt.fi/rte/lean

2003-08-20T13:43:00.000-04:00

Warren Bennis : A Leader on Leadership
Warren Bennis argues that trust and openness are key to success. He believes that groups and organizations function effectively in an open atmosphere, where people are willing and able to trust each other. He studies people who became leaders and their emergence from the ordinary mass of employees and managers. From this he defined "leadership as the capacity to create a compelling vision, and to translate into action and sustain it".

A successful leader needs to create a vision and communicate it down successfully to all employees. This in turn requires management of the self, an understanding of one's own skills and abilities so as to be most effective in preaching the vision.

Final quality, a leader needs to generate and maintain trust, "the emotional glue that binds leaders and followers together". To create trust, leaders must be consistent and believable. They should be publicly seen as accepting challenges and taking responsibility.

Great leaders have 3 common features: ambition, competence and integrity. All three are essential, else compromising on any will lead both, the leader and the organization into dangerous waters.

2003-08-19T08:29:00.000-04:00

Criteria for good UI design
In any application, the following are listed as criteria for good UI design. Good conditions to keep in mind while designing applications.

Things most people do, most often.
Things most people do, somewhat often.
Things some people do, most often.
Things some people do, somewhat often.
Things few people do, most often.
Things few people do, somewhat often.

2003-08-18T20:29:00.000-04:00

Wealth of Knowledge
Harvard Business School puts out a free weekly newsletter and has a wealth of papers and articles published in their Working Knowledge for business leaders website. The site is very useful and a lot of information on a variety of topics that are relevant to any business including Operations, Information Technology, Finance, Strategy, Entrepreneurship, and Leadership. A must read for all who are looking to grow in the corporate world.

2003-08-14T12:14:00.000-04:00

TOC & Construction Projects

The TOC SIG recently had a discussion on relevance of TOC for Construction Projects, from the perspective of a GC, especially if most of the labor is indirect (or subcontractor) labor. Here are the results of the discussion thread.

The questions posed were:

Manage 400-tasks schedule while 95% of resources are subcontractors and
Suppliers and most task times are works-technology-reasoned and not just estimated
Is CPM the right tool given, the project lacks resource constraints
Actual resource constraints are on the subcontractors.
How you train your subcontractors the TOC ways?

My summary of the discussions are as follows:

Even though it is indirect labor, resources have to be managed. Org boundaries are immaterial.
Sub-contractors have to be incented to use a central system for managing capacity and actuals. For instance, progress payments (automatic/electronic) can be tied to keeping progress updates timely.
In indirect labor, resource buffer concept of CCPM is very useful.
Various ways to manage projects – CPM, CCPM, PERT, Network centric (after Iraq war), and Bottleneck analysis

My own thoughts: TOC as a concept tries to say the following. Any system has constraints (physical, process, business, monetary, etc. are the various manifestations of it) and in order to increase productivity and efficiency, constraints have to be managed. And effective tools are needed for precisely that reason. I believe a strong combination of IT tools and sensible processes can effectively increase productivity, margins, and efficiency in the construction industry.

2003-08-07T08:46:00.000-04:00

Intermittent hiatus...

Due to travel to other work commitments, this blog has suffered from neglect for the past month or so. It is easy to fall into the trap of laziness of not writing your thoughts and actually more difficult to keep with the rigor and discipline of regular writing. Kudos to those who do it....

2003-08-07T08:44:00.000-04:00

Gartner's positioning of Primavera in Project Portfolio Management

Gartner positioned Primavera in the leader quadrant in the area of project portfolio management. See article here. Primavera has grown its project management tool by adding tons of features around accounting and financial management, but without adding depth of planning functionality. With simple capacity balancing heuristics and/or CPM techniques they have been able to become a leader in the space. A better constrained planning methodology is needed to unseat the Primavera value proposition.

2003-07-28T23:33:00.001-04:00

IGLC11 and LCI5

The 11th annual IGLC conference at Virginia tech was my first. I had the pleasure and honor of meeting several named researchers in the area of construction supply chain and lean construction research that I had only heard about. I had good discussions with several academics and practioners alike. All in all, was a wonderful and memorable experience.

My paper on constrained project planning, based on a customer case study, was well received. Several folks came up afterwards and expressed interest in working with me. Unfortunately, i2 currently is not working in the vertical and that kind of adds some complexity in the situation.

My conclusion: The industry is starting to realize value of constrained project planning, supply chain management, and the time is ripe for a construction supply chain management industry to evolve. A copy of my paper, if you are interested.

2003-07-28T23:33:00.000-04:00

Integrated Project Delivery - Owens

I recently attended the lean construction conference at Virginia Tech. Of all the papers that were presented there, one clearly stood out in my mind. There was one paper wherein a sub-contractor had figured out the contractual details of working with other subs in a "team-based-collaborative" environment. They have a trademark on "integrated project delivery". Highlights of the way they do business is as follows:

All the various trades bid and get the job. The most competent among them (irrespective of who is the main and who is the sub-contractor) is chosen as the project manager. Once in the project, they lose organizational boundaries and work as a team. If one sub has to do more work and somebody else has to do less than originally envisioned they do it. They have been able to successfully complete projects without A SINGLE CHANGE ORDER! Once the project is completed, they take a share of the profits and divide it among the team for working as a team!

Seems like dream world in construction, but it is happening for real. A copy of Owens paper can be seen here.

2003-07-04T03:42:00.000-04:00

Change Orders Seminar gets high marks

Have been travelling for a couple of weeks and will be on the road for three more weeks, but this email caught my attention that I needed to document it.

As part of the Yahoo news group - Construction News, I got an email today highlighting the value of the The Cumulative Impact of Change Orders seminar, led by Dr. Awad Hanna Ph.D., P.E. (University of Wisconsin - Madison) at the Project Performance Conference in Philadelphia. While I agree that it is important for people in the construction business to learn to better manager change orders, I think the emphasis or shift in thinking has to be more around how to ELIMINATE change orders and not how to MANAGE them better through documentation, pricing etc. This is a fundamental shift in thinking that is essentially saying the following:

The industry is currently mired in litigation because they are managing business through change orders. We need a team based approach to building buildings and infrastructure and not a litigious approach. And for that, we need to work as a team, develop mutual trust, and develop processes that will help build better together. This means NO change orders!

2003-06-26T22:13:00.000-04:00

TOC vs Lean

There have been several articles written about the similarities and differences of TOC and lean. I am not going to attempt to rewrite it again. Tim Sullivan of CIRAS has written an opinion paper on the topic which can be found here. I am going to summarize it here so thatwhen we develop the same theories for construction, we can adapt the same. Hopefully, we will be able to apply the best of both to develop a composite theory for construction.

Issue	TOC	Lean
Objective	Zero inventory	Strategic location of WIP
Principle	One piece flow	Function of transfer and process batch
Principle	Eliminate waste	Some waste absolute must

2003-06-25T08:54:00.000-04:00

Oracle's Project Mangement solution in Engineering and Construction

A growing number of leading engineering, construction and consulting companies are leveraging the Oracle Projects family of applications to increase the profitability and performance levels of their project-centric, global operations. Companies such as Black & Veatch, CDM, CH2M HILL, HNTB, Mustang Engineering, Parsons Brinckerhoff and Skanska use or plan to use Oracle Projects to manage thousands of multimillion-dollar projects per year. For more information, read the article. The article goes on to say,

Faced with increased competition and economic instability, today's engineering, construction and consulting firms are striving to reduce risk through improved visibility into enterprise information, elimination of redundant data sources and standardization of business processes. By enabling companies to centralize project information and integrate all cost driving components, Oracle Projects streamlines the full project lifecycle -- from conception through execution and facilities management. Oracle Projects also integrates with other enterprise operations, making relevant, timely information available to all project stakeholders.

From what I know, the Oracle solution does not have a strong project scheduling engine behind it. So, I believe the value they derive here is through standardization, consolidation of data systems, and possibly better collaboration. I doubt they are aggregating procurement visibility and resource sharing capabilities. That is where the supply chain value proposition is.

2003-06-25T08:14:00.000-04:00

Primavera's customer support center

AECCafe ran a news clip on an award that has been won by the customer support center at Primavera. The award was given by Support Center Practices (SCP) Certification program. As software sheds its "newness" and its fad status, and as it moves into the realm of becoming a utility, software development and support, I predict, will enter into the realm of reliability more than functionality. To this end, organizations like SCP will become more important.

Particularly, in the AEC space, I feel that support, both in terms of technical issues with software use (how do I do X, where can I find the button to do Y etc.), and functional use (how can I schedule a project, how do I solve this procurement problem etc.) is very important. Since, we are talking an industry wherein most of the workforce is mobile and most productive when they are NOT sitting in front of a computer, but actually in the field working. Hence, we need a strong service support organization in this space. For more information on PV's award, read the article.

2003-06-24T19:57:00.000-04:00

TOC vs Lean:

First, for some introductions:

TOC or Theory of Constraints: It is a concept that has been developed by Elihayu Goldratt. His famous book, "The Goal" introduces the concepts in the background of a novel. Very simply stated, it says that in any manufacturing system, production is controlled by the capacity of the bottleneck resource(s). TOC is primarily about maximizing throughput in a production system by effectively identifying and managing the bottleneck resources. Goldratt followed the Goal by a similar book on the application of theory of constraints applied to projects. The book "Critical Chain" extensively developed the fundamental concepts of theory of constraints for projects.
Lean Production: Lean production was first developed by Taichii Ohno of Toyota Motor Corporation. He extensively studied Ford's mass manufacturing system and tried to identify its limitations and develop solutions for it. In the end, he developed a whole system wherein the production system devises a system wherein there is a continuous flow of the unit that is being manufactured without any time lapse (in an ideal sense). Practically, this means that the system will identify steps that was wasteful and try to reduce it to the extent possible. The book called "Machine that changed the world", by James Womack and Daniel Jones is a classic that extensively covers the topic.

Today, there are several people who study, consult, and develop critical chain project management. Frank Patrick has been writing a weblog on this and is something I follow regularly.

Today, there are several people who study both theories, identify similarities and differences. The lean construction organization is attempting to develop the whole lean production concept for a project based system including lean design, lean supply, and lean project management. Joe Ely maintains a weblog o this topic.

2003-06-23T15:58:00.000-04:00

Process Management Theories:

In the recent past, there have been several manufacturing and process management theories that have evolved. These include "Lean" (or the Toyota Production System), "TOC" (Theory of Constraints), Six Sigma etc. Each was designed for various purposes in various manufacturing industries, but they also purport one common theme - continuous improvement. In the next few articles, to the extent possible, I would like to compare and constrast these theories and see what is applicable in construction. I am going to particularly focus on TOC and lean.

2003-06-15T20:18:00.000-04:00

Secret of Dell's success

News.com has an article on Dell's meteoric rise in the PC manufacturing business. The article analyzes the steps Dell took to reduce inventories, reshape demand. It emphasizes how Dell realized the importance of planning, proactive demand visibility into supply demand mismatches, and providing visibility of its demand to its suppliers were the cornerstones of Dell's transformation.

The AEC industry, while it cannot directly adopt the Dell model (AEC is a low-volume engineer-to-order business whereas Dell is a high-volume build-to-order business model), it can definitely take the learnings to heart. Providing visibility to various players in a project (architect, engineers, contractors, sub-contractors etc.) and streamlining information through the supply chain can lead to transformational business models. Hoarding information to prevent litigation is the WRONG approach. Sharing information will lead to projects that are easier to implement, and I'll venture to predict in a less adversarial environment too.

Who knows, the same surprises that Dell saw could be seen here as well, namely:

First, as inventory dropped, lead-time performance improved. This happened because Dell was not simply carrying component inventory against forecasted sales, but rather was aligning inventory and sales, managing profitability on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Second, as inventory disappeared, the company's returns grew disproportionately. Not only did Dell avoid carrying costs and obsolete stock, but it was also saving enormous amounts of money on purchasing components because the component prices were dropping 3 percent per month.

2003-06-14T15:14:00.000-04:00

Critical Chain Project Management

The two major theories of creating a schedule and managing a project are the Critical Path Method (CPM) and the theory-of-constraints based Critical Chain (CCPM) method. Given the fact that CPM typically only considers the precedence relationships between the various tasks in a project and not the capacity of the resources that works on the tasks, CPM schedules are only good in theory. In practice, they are useless.

Enter CCPM. They use two primary ways to account for fact that individual tasks in a project might take longer than needed and the fact that resources working on tasks have a finite capacity. They are:

Time buffer management
Capacity buffer management

Frank Patrick maintains a weblog titled "focused performance" wherein he further described CCPM.

CCPM does a better job of managing the variability within a project schedule, but am not too convinced of its value proposition in a multi-project with shared resources scenario. It will be a good exercise to compare the lean construction technique to CCPM technique to study the pros and cons of both.

2003-06-11T13:31:00.000-04:00

Power of inspiration

Watched the movie "October Sky" yesterday. It is a story of four boys from a coal mining community, who go to great efforts against all odds to make a rocket after being inspired by the Sputnik. I always enjoy such inspirational movies. The hero of the movie, Homer Hickam is encouraged to pursue his dreams against all odds by his teacher and friends. His mother endearingly supports his endeavors, while his father is against it.

It takes a lot of self-confidence and die hard faith to pursue dreams. But encouragement from people who care is crucial. Sometimes it is their faith in the dreamers that keep them going when things are not looking up. In my personal experience, my parents and more recently my wife, have been encouraging of my dreams, however small and insignificant. And I still have vivid memories of a few teachers whose way of teaching and encouraging is foreever etched in my memories. And along the way there have been family and friends who have also been supportive of my ideas and dreams. I find that I work best in a positive environment wherein I'm being encouraged. And I learn better from constructive criticism than negative critiquing.

The latest in the series of dreams is to build a vision and execute around construction supply chain management. To all those who helped me get to where I am today, thank you! If I end up like Homer, it will be due to your collective efforts. Someday, I hope to repay your faith in me.

2003-06-10T12:19:00.000-04:00

5S for Project Delivery

Hal Macomber maintains a weblog on Reforming Project Management wherein he extols the virtues of lean principles and the evolving last planner method of project planning. I read his log quite regularly and like a lot of what he says. In a recent post, he talks about the "5S for Projects" namely:

seiri (sort) - organization
seiton (set in order)- orderliness
seiso (shine)- cleanliness
seiketsu (standardize) - standardized clean-up
shitsuke (sustain) - discipline

The result - Better flow = less waste!. The flow what Hal is talking about is flow of work. Personally, I think most of hindrance in project progress is information flow. Either the worker is waiting for information or the information is waiting for a worker. So, there needs to be an item in the list for information flow.

He also puts out a project e-Tip every wednesday. So, far most are around the need for communication between the various members of the project team to achieve the common goal of on-time project delivery.

2003-06-07T14:40:00.000-04:00

Now Showing at Blockbuster: How Revenue-sharing Contracts Improve Supply Chain Performance

I came across this article from Knowledge@Emory and also as part of discussion with John Macomber.

The article discusses Blockbuster's new business strategy by which they have modified their video rental contracts with studios. Originally, they used to buy videos from the studios at a wholesale price (of $65) and renting them (at $3) which makes the breakeven point at 22 rentals. Now, they buy them at $8, but share the total rental revenue with the studios. In other words, the more Blockbuster rents out a cassette, the more revenue BOTH the studio and blockbuster makes! This shifts the inventory risk to the studio, but

Results? Blockbuster market share jumped from 25% to 31% and increased its cash flow by 61%. You can get further details by reading the paper here.

Can the AEC industry use such similar revenue sharing techniques. I believe so. I can imagine a contract being written by which, each party has an additional clause in the contract that says, if the whole project (ie., sum of all the work done by all the trades) comes in early, then everybody gets a bonus as a function of the number of days it is delivered early (of course without compromising quality). Why not introduce earliness bonus just like lateness penalties. Who wants to experiment?

Next time, you see a sign in at a local blockbuster that says, "If you do not find a new movie, we'll rent it to you for free" sign, you know where the strategy came from!

2003-06-05T17:38:00.000-04:00

Constructech Vision Awards

Constructech is an magazine dedicated to bring construction related news. They conduct an annual contest titled Constructech Vision Awards. The awards are to honor companies that have realized the advantages of applying modern technologies to their businesses. The criteria for the awards are the following:

How changing technology is incorporated within your company.
How processes have been improved through the use of technology.
How new processes resulted in better performance.
Originality and ingenuity of technology solution.
What is the benefit to the overall business practice?
What technology led to productivity improvements?
Increased ability to adapt to market conditions through technology.
How was customer service enhanced through technology?
How has technology improved your competitiveness?

Unfortunately, the site does not list the achievements of the winners from the previous years, so I cannot comment on those. But, companies that successfully adopt supply chain management, in my mind, will have to be on the list. For successful construction supply chain management, technology plays a minor role. Process change is more important.

2003-06-04T16:18:00.000-04:00

Microsoft Project 2003

Microsoft is planning to link its "Microsoft Project" tool to its "Office Productivity Package" in the next release - Microsoft Project 2003. The big features of Project 2003

Make it a server version. Project was a simple desktop-only application
Ability to tie reports from Project to a browser or to email client
Push alerts (delays in projects) to Outlook email client
Tie in Sharepoint collaboration software to share documentation and information
Expose the data in XML format to provide the ability to tie to accounting and financial systems

This is an excellent move by Microsoft. They are recognizing the market trend of increasing project management software and developing a horizontal around it. The ability to tie project management and collaboration to other peripheral areas including reporting, tracking, alerts, and financials will be crucial. ISVs can develop domain specific applications on top of this developing processes. Specifically, construction industry can develop multi-enterprise project collaboration around this platform which is at the heart of successful network supply chain management. Of course, the price point at which Microsoft will sell this will be interesting to watch out for. As a desktop application, Project was affordable to players in the construction industry, but with such a heavy weight server and all this integration, I doubt it will be.

Of course, project has a pitiful scheduling engine behind it. It has no ability to schedule intelligently. It has no ability to define constraints other than precedence and resources. For instance, material constraints cannot be defined for tasks. There is very little multi-project scheduling with shared resource scheduling support in Project. Basically, if architected correctly, we could potentially provide an intelligent scheduling engine with Project as the UI front end.

2003-06-04T09:19:00.000-04:00

Rain Water Harvesting - Simple Concept, Great Payoff

The economist this week has published an article on Chennai's efforts at RWH here. I learnt about rain water harvesting about a year and a half ago and have since been an advocate for it. Especially for countries like India (which is where I am from), it is a no brainer. What is rainwater harvesting? Well, very simply, all it is is redirecting all the rainwater that falls on the roof of your house and its surrounding land into the natural groundwater aquifer below so that it can be used during the non-monsoon months. In fact, in order to convince the non-believers and skeptics, members of the Akash Ganga Trust built India's first raincentre at Chennai. The centre serves as a live working model demonstrating the benefits of RWH and also serves as an information dissemination center. Along with a few other volunteers, I help to maintain a website on the raincentre.

Lots of groundbreaking research and historical stufy of RWH has also been done by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) maintains an extensive information website on RWH. The CSE is a non-profit that has been doing work on economical alternatives for some of the core problems in india including clean air, RWH, gobar gas fuel etc.

RWH is now mandated by the government in all structures at Chennai. But it is appalling to know that people are still having trouble convincing themselves about installing these in their houses. Last time I visited Chennai, people found it natural to buy water on a daily/weekly basis for their daily needs, but were relunctant to invest money in installing RWH structures in their houses.

Interested in learning more after glancing the websites above? Join the yahoo groups discussion forum at akashgangachennai.

2003-06-03T22:51:00.000-04:00

Opportunities for IT to Support Construction Supply Chain

That is the topic of a paper that Prof. William O'Brien and I co-authored for the ASCE conference at Nashville later this year. Once the paper is published I will post a link to it here.

Basically, we reviewed why construction industry is not jumping on the supply chain bandwagon like manufacturing did. We propose an implementation path on how to go about doing it for players in the construction industry including Architects, Engineers, and Construction guys. Our essential points are the following:

Do it in phases
First clean up the internal processes within a firm before expanding it to the extended supply chain
There is plenty of opportunity for IT in construction. In fact, there is a need for a sister construction SCM industry just like the manufacturing SCM industry

I enjoyed working on this paper. It helped clarify my thoughts a lot. I would like to make a career out of it. $64 question is, is it in academia or is it in a startup? Prof. Bill O'Brien does exclusive research in construction supply chain management. I have known him for two years, but we have never met. I am looking forward to meeting him at the International Lean Construction Conference in Blacksburg in July this year.

2003-05-29T13:05:00.000-04:00

Value of simple automation...

Today, I saw this article in ENR. It is titled "Information Technology - Integration". It talks about the the value of integrating disparate software systems.

In this case, Blach Construction Co., Santa Clara CA, has developed an in-house system called Blach Integration Framework. It is a visual basic program wherein field personnel can fill a one-page daily report online and data is populated automatically to Timberling Gold (estimation), Meridian Prolog Manager (project planning), Primavera SureTrak (project execution tracking), and Microsoft Outlook (email) as appropriate. The value proposition:

The company is expecting to save $140,000 this year and more than $530,000 over three years.
People can submit their reports (previously it was done manually and took half an hour each night) in one-quarter to one-third the time. Multiply that out by the number of people and the savings are significant.

Their recipe to success according to their IT Manager: "... one reason for its success is that he made sure that often-overlooked field superintendents were involved in the development process"

2003-05-28T22:01:00.000-04:00

Engineering automation software

Continuing on the thoughts from yesterday, in my tenure as an engineer I realized:

There is an eminent need for automation tools
Current engineering process has a lot of non-value added data (re)creation.
Simple tools to communicate between analysis and visualization, visualization and estimation, visualization and scheduling will be tremendously valuable
Engineers by nature are (thankfully so) suspicious of any automation and need a number of checks and balances to provide them with a comfort level that the machines are acting "right"

Personally, I believe that the construction supply chain management industry is going to mature in this decade. By that I mean, that we will see the evolution of IT providers who provide tailored solutions to address the construction supply chain problems and also that we will see some new business processes evolve as a result of that.

2003-05-27T23:42:00.000-04:00

Laziness? Hmm, they are productivity improvement tools

Within a year of being a structural engineer, irrespective of whether or not I earned for being an engineer, I had earned a reputation for creating simple automation tools for doing repetitive tasks. I did these mostly because I was too lazy to manually type information from one system to another (and it honestly seemed like a natural thing to have) and did not have the patience to do it repetitively and ensure there were no errors. These were not complex tools, just simple tools to transfer data between spreadsheets and autoCAD or spreadsheet and engineering analysis software (RamSteel).

Since then, I have been working for a supply chain management software company and learnt some about software and process automation. It is only now that I realize the tools I created could very well be served as such productivity improvement tools. And there is tremendous value is such productivity improvement tools since they reduce the inefficiency in the engineering (and construction) process. In fact, right now, I am writing a paper titled "IT Opportunities in Construction Supply Chain Management" for the ASCE IT conference in Nashville (I will put a link to the paper online once it is published).

In fact, that's precisely how my interest in construction supply chain management began. I realized that people were spending too much time in wasted effort and that essentially took away the pleasure of "engineering". I enjoyed my career as an engineer, more because it gave me the pleasure to create. I could see tangible results of my work when a building was completed. What I did not like was the repetitive non-value added work.

In my opinion, good engineers have an intuition that comes with experience. They will be able to tell if a beam is sized right, just by looking at it or feeling. Analysis software only confirmed their intuition. Of course, I am exaggerating for effect, but you get the idea. Engineering intuition is picked up by working in the field, working and reviewing design, not computing the same analysis over and over again.

2003-05-22T13:55:00.000-04:00

Scientists and the rest of us...

I am reading a book called Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow. I am not fully through with the book, but there is one passage wherein Feynman compares scientists to ordinary people that is worth quoting:

Don't think it is so different being a scientist. The average person is not so far away from a scientist. ... The average person puts together ideas of their experiences to see something else, or some relationship, that was not apparent before. Scientists do the same, but in a different subject.

... Really all we do is a hell of a lot more of one particular kind of thing that is normal and ordinary! People do have imaginations, they just do not work on it as long. Creativity is done by everybody, its just that scientists do more of it. What is not ordinary is to do it so intensively that all this experience is piled up for all these yaers on the same limited subject.

I tend to agree. Ordinary people are capable of extraordinary things, given the right conditioning, environment, and motivation. But the difficulty is in keeping up the motivation and persistence. More often than not, people tend to give up. Those who can get past that hurdle and keep going will see things fall into place. And the spark that goes off when a problem suddenly is solved and all the pieces fall together is an extraordinary eureka feeling.

Another thing that Feynman was famous for. He always believed that as people got more and more educated, their brain got conditioned and that in-of-itself made it difficult for them to solve problems later. In other words, to solve problems, you need to look at it from a child's perspective. And in order to remain youthful in thoughts, Feynman is known to have solved problems by himself, in his way, so that he could understand them better.

2003-05-21T08:38:00.000-04:00

Mardi Gras 2003:

I was part of a team that helped organize MG 2003 (the annual cultural festival of IIT Madras, now called Saarang), this past weekend. We usually have food at such events, and in order to better estimate the amount of food to order, we caoxed folks who registered to pay online. We had about 250 people sign up. But we have had experience with no-shows and so we organized food for 215 people. In the end, we had about about 150 show up. Now, what does this have to do with "supply chain management" or even specifically "construction SCM"? Everything.

Organizing the event is like running a project. Arranging for a food was done based on forecast. In fact, to ensure reliability of the forecast, we had people pay online. But when the forecasting failed, we had a lot of wasted food, ala inventory. All project schedules and associated procurement of labor and materials are built based on forecast and expectations of tasks being completed in the future. When things deviate from the plan, we need a system of alerts and techniques to quickly react to the situation and contain the damage and that's precisely what SCM is all about. No matter how good the planning is, we need efficient and effective tools for exception management. If we do, then that will help greatly reduce the delays in construction projects.

Back to the event. The event was a great success otherwise. In fact, somebody in the audience commented "You guys had great planning and wonderful scheduling, but your forecasting technique was bad!" Who would have thought people would pay, but now show up? Ultimately, the saving grace in our event was that we managed to find a homeless shelter who gladly took all the excess food.

2003-05-14T14:50:00.000-04:00

In a lighter vein...

A friend of mine just sent me this comic strip of Calvin and Hobbes. It nicely sums up the attitudes of most wannabes, not unlike myself. Especially in today's economic climate, it is easy to get bogged down and wait for recovery to happen. Opportunities are out there, but it is upto us to go get them. They will not come to us. Or worse still, they might, but you will never know until it is too late. We have to make the recovery happen.

2003-05-13T21:53:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I referred to Rajesh Jain's weblog. His passion is to develop information technology for the non consumers, i.e., developing countries who do not have the current IT baggage. He believes and I firmly agree that the next decade of IT development including solutions will happen in emerging countries like India. Rajesh is trying to build a software application business around it. I sure hope he succeeds.

Just like Rajesh, there is another group in Chennai, the TeNet group, that has somewhat similar objectives. But while Rajesh is aiming to developing software applications, the Tenet groupis interested more in infrastructure and tele-communications. Led by some industrious researchers and like minded academicians from IIT Madras, they are involved in developing solutions for Networking, Digital Systems Architecture, and Fibre Optics for India and emerging economies.

All of these efforts are fundamentally grounded in building the digital divide that will bring technology to the masses so that everybody can benefit and gain from it. I'll write more about this later.

2003-05-11T20:34:00.000-04:00

For the past year or so, I have discovered blogs. The first person whose blog I read, and continue to do so regularly is Rajesh Jain (www.emergic.org) He maintains a blog on Emerging Technlogies, Enterprises, and Markets. He, I can say, is the one who inspired me to blog. One of his recent posts:

Today, I complete a year of blogging. The year has seen a total of 1767 posts in the past 365 days for an average of almost 5 posts daily. Blogging has now become an integral part of my daily life. Even though I have been writing the Tech Talk column daily Mon-Fri for over two-and-a-half-years, it was the blog which has helped diversify my reading and writing, and put me in touch with a lot of new people and ideas. ...
The on thing I try and do is to blog daily. This is one lesson I have learnt from publishing on the Internet: it has to become a habit in people's lives - for both the writer and the reader. This is perhaps the one secret to blogging - whatever you do, whever you do, make sure you post daily.
The blog now is for me an extension of my memory - almost everything I have read (and found interesting) and thought in the past year is here. ...
The hardest part about blogging is making a beginning. It took me many months before I started. I wanted to be sure that I'll be able to write, and perhaps more importantly, that I'll be honest and transparent on the weblog - will write what I think. I owe that to the blogging community which has helped shape my thinking by their act of sharing ideas. ...

I hope to be as industrious as Rajesh in writing in this blog. I will check back periodically to reflect on my progress.

2003-05-07T21:41:00.000-04:00

For the past eight years or so, I have had a few ideas that all fall under the broad umbrella of AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) automation. The ideas have ranged from CAD automation tools, to integration of engineering and visualization, to real-time visualization, to systems management. I have discussed my ideas with friends and family alike, basically to anyone who was willing to lend a ear. In this blog, I would like to present and explore these thoughts further and hopefully interact with others whose interests mirror mine.