Kontraktor kelas F disaran serta IBS

Berita Harian, Khamis, 29 Mac 2007

SUBANG JAYA: Kerajaan mensasarkan lebih 20 kontraktor Bumiputera terutama kelas F mampu menjadi vendor industri pembinaan negara, khususnya dalam Sistem Binaan Berindustri (IBS) dan pengedar bahan binaan.

Timbalan Menteri Pembangunan Usahawan dan Koperasi, Datuk Khamsiyah Yeop, berkata pembabitan hanya 40 kontraktor Bumiputera seluruh negara dalam sistem berkenaan termasuk sebahagian kecil kontraktor kelas F, pada tempoh tiga tahun, menunjukkan perkembangan agak perlahan.

Jumlah itu, katanya, adalah terlalu kecil berbanding bilangan kontraktor berdaftar dengan Pusat Khidmat Kontraktor (PKK) sehingga bulan lalu, seramai 46,473 kontraktor dan 32,022 daripadanya adalah kontraktor kelas F.

Beliau berkata, jumlah itu juga membabitkan kontraktor yang mengeluarkan produk binaan secara kecil-kecilan.

Sehubungan itu, katanya, kesedaran supaya kontraktor terutama kelas F memperluaskan cabang kerja masing-masing perlu dipertingkatkan, bagi memastikan mereka tidak berharap terhadap kerja pembinaan semata-mata.

“Kontraktor perlu didedahkan dengan meluas faedah menyertai IBS yang menggunakan teknologi berbeza, berbanding cara konvensional digunakan sebelum ini,” katanya pada sidang media, di sini, semalam.

Why Knowledge Management Crucial for the Realization of National IBS Roadmap

IBS DIGEST (CIDB) ISSUE NO.2 2006

Authors :Nik Ahmad Faizul, Industry Development Director, Innovacia Sdn Bhd & Wan Amrul Wan Mustafa, Chief Knowledge Architect, Innovacia Sdn Bhd

Knowledge was the driving force behind the Industrial Age. It was somehow subsided and nearly forgotten until the next wave arrived which is the Digital Age. This new age has re-surfaced knowledge again as one of the key dimension to propel global growth. Hence, Knowledge Management (KM) is now an important discipline and an essential source that our economy cannot afford to do without, if we are to have competitive advantage and remain relevant.

In Wikipedia, KM refers to a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, and distribute knowledge for reuse, awareness and learning across the organization.From business standpoint, Harvard Business Review refers KM as the way companies generate, communicate, and leverage their intellectual assets.

We have also seen over the last ten years, highly significant event took placed on the advancement and explosion of information and communication technology (ICT) driven by the liberalization of global economies. This has lead to tremendous transformation in the manner businesses are being executed. The world is not only becoming borderless but also flatter instead of round as the bestseller writer, Thomas L Friedman put it. Information are now highly accessible and being exploited to an unimaginable scale. The rat race for market positioning is as fierce as ever through the capitalization of information, knowledge and innovation.
This scenario has also lead major economies to have greater access than ever before into countries such as India and China to exploit its competitive resources leading to a more competitive product and services in the marketplace.

With this challenging phenomenon, it is now overdue and absolutely critical that we need to expedite our readiness, the know-how and competitiveness of our Malaysian Construction Industry in order to survive and sustain; an industry which is now minus 1.6% growth based on year 2005 government statistic. The fragmented nature of our industry need to be consolidated and reconstructed in order to realize the government’s aspirations on the National IBS Roadmap which targets the industry to be industrialized by the year 2010.

As part of efforts to steer various sectors towards our Vision 2020, the Malaysian government has also launched the National Knowledge-Based Economy Masterplan which was first announced by the government in the Budget 2000. This masterplan marks yet another key government initiative to further accelerate the development of the nation into a knowledge-based economy. It provides strategic framework outlining the changes to the fundamentals of the economy.

These National IBS Roadmap and Knowledge-Based Economy Masterplan have provided a good base information related the policy targets and objectives. However, this information alone will not progress our industrialisation effort. It is only a reference document on policy direction. As such, strategies still need to be formulated downstream within each sector. In doing so, we need to capture our industry knowledge, consolidate, reconfigure and strategise to our best competitive advantage, in order to progress.

To one of KM guru, the late Peter Drucker, leaders often mistake information for knowledge. Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose. Converting data into information thus required knowledge. And knowledge, by definition, is specialized.
Another misconception on KM is that it is ICT oriented. ICT is purely a tool to an end. It should not be treated as the driving factor for KM. Business strategies and direction instead, are the true drivers for KM.

With a cohesive and collaborative effort involving government and industry, we are in position to consolidate our fragmented industry information and ignite our latent intellectual assets. We believe such assets do exist based on our exposure in national mega infrastructural projects over the past 15 years as well as the world is now being flatten with information at the press of a button.

“A company(as an industry member) is not a machine but a living organism”.- Ikujiro Nonaka, KM Guru specialising on Japanese Business Strategies. However, efforts on the ‘HOW TO’ for the National IBS Roadmap seems way behind and need to be urgently accelerated. One of the key factor for this delay is that the industry by nature, is very much project based instead of program based. The soft aspect has not been fully exploited especially on the management of industry knowledge.

A knowledge based construction industry would induce a conducive environment to propel the acceleration of our IBS Roadmap. However, current mindset on ‘information protectionism’ need to be phased out. This is very much due to the current ‘Red Ocean’ overcrowded marketplace whereby companies are engaged in head-to-head competition struggling to survive, let alone to sustain.

IBS on the other hand, is a new industry with endless opportunities. In order to commence with this exploration, it has to start with knowledge sharing as the new working culture within the industry. This approach encourages investment on ‘trust’ which in turn, will lead companies who used to be in competition, to better understand each other and collaborate for improved market positioning in this new ‘Blue Ocean’ industry.

It is only with this ‘Open Collaboration’ environment that we are able to induce participation, develop and steer, impactful downstream strategies to support the roadmap implementation.
This effort on KM however, need to be driven from both top and bottom ends of industry heirarchy. Apart from being policy driven, each industry organization plays an equally crucial role in developing industry’s intellectual capability. This effort will result in the organization to be more specialize and therefore provides an improved strategic positioning for the industry as a whole.

“ To remain competitive – maybe even to survive, businesses will have to convert themselves into organizations of knowledgeable specialists.” - Peter Drucker

Based on the above, we need to create our own speciality and niche in order to sustain. It is only through KM that this can be achieved and therefore, necessitates companies to review their internal organizational strategies and methodologies.

The essence of KM in an organization is best put forward by Alex Bennet, former Chief Knowledge Officer of US Department of Navy. She describes the essence of knowledge management is built on intellectual capital, which includes human capital, social capital and corporate capital. All three are essential components of enterprise knowledge (see diagram).
Human capital is our greatest resource. It is made up of an individual’s past, present and future. Social capital related to communications, human and virtual networks, relationship, collaborations, etc. As for Corporate Capital, it covers intellectual property, corporate assets and organizational processes. Knowledge Management can be viewed as a process for optimizing the effective application of intellectual capital to achieve organizational objectives.

The current industry however, perceived as having assets, financial capital and staff would be sufficient to realize company objectives. It is more focus on the tangible aspect of the organization. The crucial intangible elements were completely overlooked and this has impacted our competitiveness.

In conclusion and as way forward, we clearly need to diagnose ourselves as individual, company, associations, industry as well as the policy makers on how far are we in our positioning to persevere the demanding and exhaustive rat race for market positioning, and most critically our existence and sustainability in the current Globalization era.

The ultimate way forward is for us to inject into ourselves intellectual knowledge which will lead us to the Know-How by becoming the specialist within the marketplace. This can be achieved by being more open minded, unbiased, neutral, patriotic, emotional and aggressive in our efforts to support and participate in the realization of the National IBS Agenda.

Better Houses for All

By LOONG MENG YEE and WANI MUTHIAH
The Star, Saturday April 22, 2006

SHAH ALAM: Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi wants good quality and affordable homes set in comfortable neighbourhoods for the people. The houses must also be the result of responsible development, he said at the launch of the Housing and Local Government’s computerised “open registration system” for low-cost houses at the state secretariat building here.

LIGHT MOMENT: Abdullah, Housing and Local Government Minister Datuk Seri Ong Ka Ting and Selangor Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Dr Mohd Khir Toyo laughing at the antics of a low-cost housing applicant being interviewed through video conferencing in Shah Alam yesterday. — Bernamapic

Abdullah said houses of good quality could be built with the implementation of the Industrialised Building System (IBS) in which component parts like windows and doors would be mass-produced. The system could stabilise the price of building materials as mass production would help to reduce costs, he said. He said the IBS would ensure the quality of houses as all parts would come from factories. “This is crucial as contractors usually don’t follow specifications and people complain that the houses they get in the end are not as advertised,” he said.

Abdullah also wanted a comprehensive ICT database set up to help house buyers obtain necessary information like the location of housing projects and pricing, among other things.
“Some people (want to) buy homes in places far from where they are living, some near their kampungs to settle down in after retirement,” he said. “So, it is good to have a database on homes giving details like where they are to be built, pricing, and whether they are located near towns.”

Abdullah said housing developers must be responsible and look into various factors like environmental implications before launching projects. “One cannot foresee what can happen in housing areas. Places which had never been flooded before have become flood prone after houses are built there,” he noted. He said irresponsible developers often took the easy way out like cutting down trees and dumping soil into rivers for their housing projects, which in the end caused flooding.

The House of the Future

Building Blocks

Article excerpted from Popular Science Magazine, November 2006

Imagine if cars were built the way most houses are. A procession of trucks would deliver materials and parts to your driveway – sheet metal, spools of wire, screws, pistons, a roll of carpet, bumpers and a steering wheel. Then day laborers would arrive to put it all together. In the rain. It sounds absurdly efficient, yet that’s the accepted way of constructing a modern American house.

While cars, computers and other products have improved dramatically in recent decades, houses have changed almost as little as the methods used to build them. “Every product except homes has become more sophisticated, with higher quality at lower cost,” says architect Kent Larson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."Homes are just the opposite.”

Larson is perhaps the country’s lead proponent of a radical new approach to designing and constructing homes. The house of the future, he says, should be more like a personal computer or a car. It should be affordable, built mostly in a factory, and with parts that are easy to repair or replace. You should be able to design your own home online, just as you can today with a Dell laptop or a Honda minivan. The key to making it happen? Follow the lead of other industries: standardize and accessorize.

Take personal computers. Products made by competing manufacturers are standardized for compatibility. You can buy virtually any printer or mouse on the market, and it will work with the computer you already own. “Nobody has to agree on what a mouse is; you just have to agree on the USB port,” Larson says.

Before houses can be built this way, though, the industry needs standards analogous to the USB standard for computers. “You don’t have to agree on the toilet, but you have to agree on how the toilet connects to the wall or the floor,” Larson explains. That may sound easy enough, but getting dozens of manufacturers to sync their johns will require fundamental changes in the homebuilding industry.

A House Made to Order

Prefabricated components – like walls, floors and plumbing – make home construction a snap



One of the key components of the MIT Open Source house is the core wall [A], a prefab unit into which all of the plumbing is already installed. Even the toilet [B] is built directly into the wall instead of attached to a waste drain on the floor. The core wall is simply hooked up to the service lines, and then the tiling and fixtures (sink, shower) are added to complete the bathroom. The house’s flooring is fitted with adjustable feet [C], which rest on the subfloor and provide soundproofing and space for HVAC ductwork [D]. The electrical wiring [E] is easily accessible behind removable paneling [F], making installation of extra outlets easy. Finally, the interior walls [G], which also arrive fully assembled, are snapped into place to form rooms.