Real Estate Developers & Builder Community Seek Solutions to Reduce Cost and Improve Timely Project Deliveries.

Coordination of architectural or good for construction drawings remains one of the major concerns with real estate developers, builders and construction companies, a recent survey conducted for Excelize Architectural Services, a leading architectural service provider and pioneer in Design Management Services (DMS) for AEC firms, has revealed.

The survey, which mapped real estate projects across the country, showed that developers and builders were running up huge costs resulting from delays caused by the increasing number of rework activities on most of their sites.

The survey chiefly focused on commercial and residential projects was conducted by Excelize a global architectural services provider in coordination with the leading market research firm "Opinion Market Research".  

Opinion Market Research is India's first independent Market research agency specializing in conducting high quality fieldwork for consumer, institutional and rural research on a nation wide scale over the last 20 years. 

The survey revealed that as many as 96 per cent of the developers believed that not having coordinated drawings was one of the biggest challenges the real estate industry was facing in timely execution of projects.

Nearly all of the builders/developers that the survey covered narrated incidents when actual construction had to be indefinitely postponed, after site engineers detected clash points in architectural drawings.

Reworking drawings obviously lead to projects overshooting deadlines. Along with precious time what builders lost in the process was their credibility.

In all 92 per cent of the builders interviewed in  the survey said that when drawings did land at the sites in time there were very few that were coordinated, coherent and construction ready.

“There weren't many drawings that could be called as Good for Construction Drawings (GFC)” one developer said, highlighting the pressing need to have rigorously trained and experienced team of architectural drawing professionals backing up every project.

The survey has shown that issues pertaining to Drawing Coordination, Rework Activities on Site and delayed deliveries of construction schedules due to improper interpretation of Good for Construction (GFC) drawings can account for more than 20 per cent of the total time delays on any project.

Close to 99 per cent of developers and builders felt that unless value added architectural consultancy services came up to take up  project coordination of Design and Execution to ensure good quality and timely deliveries of Construction Drawings, there was no way they could avoid the delays and cost escalations.

Incidentally Sonali Dhopte, Director, Excelize Architectural Services, in her article in the December 2008 issue of "Construction World" had described in great detail how "Design Management Services (DMS), is evolving over the years to address these very problems of design coordination, project management and tracking, design localization, design documentation and building information modeling (BIM) .

Sonali Dhopte, in her article had forecast that the DMS market would grow at the rate of 30 per cent annually and to become a $90 billion worth industry by 2015.