No fewer than 61 buildings collapsed across the country in 2022, leading to the loss of lives and properties among others. However, incidences of building collapse can be minimised with the right adoption of technologies in the construction process as noted by the Executive Director of Operations for Costech Computers Limited, Olamide Ogunlola, in this interview.
Tell us about Costech Computers Limited
Costech is an ICT company that provides consulting services and solutions for advanced digital transformational applications. These applications include building information modelling, AutoCAD. We have digital manufacturing as well for industries that are into manufacturing that need to digitalise their entire operations. We also have what we call a project portfolio. Project portfolio is for project management; how do you manage projects on a construction site, building site, and anything that has to do with a project. These are the kinds of applications that we do.
We are a gold partner of Autodesk in Nigeria; that means we are the number one partner of Autodesk in Nigeria.
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How can technology be deployed to minimise incidences of building collapse and infrastructure decay?
What we have noticed is that every professional in the lifecycle of most projects works solo; they are not collaborating. For instance, during the lifecycle of a particular project or building, they are not able to get the data for the building or project.
For instance, they don’t know the expiration dates of maybe the materials that were used. They don’t have an insight into how that particular building can be maintained. Or even the facility managers don’t have the basic drawings of that building, probably because it is old or something. So, what technology does is to bring data. Data is what we are talking about, from the point at which you have the conceptual dream of having to do a particular project to when you will be doing the facility management that is 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down the line. You still have access to the same data which we are talking about.
During construction, what happens is that the architect designs, the structural engineer does not have access to that particular drawing, and does not know the structural integrity of that particular project. I am not even talking about trying to cut costs, but the owner is able to have an insight into what the architect is doing. What the structural engineer and the mechanical engineer are doing are being coordinated together using BIM. BIM is Building Information Modelling where you have all the professionals; whatever project they want to do on a single project, having them as a unified model in 3D.
So, what the technology does is to enable us to coordinate all the models, all the drawings as a model so that you can navigate and you can detect clashes, before it is constructed. You can see the constructability virtually before it is being produced.
You can predict how the performance of manufactured products will be virtually before you now go into mass production. So, these are the advantages and the moment you are doing that, it automatically generates the costs. So, the owner will automatically know the cost of all these models both from the architects and engineers, and put together what it would cost him rather than getting to site and you are now revising and doing change orders which will cost more money. So, technology helps.
What is the rate of adoption of technology in our construction industry from your experience? Do you think that we are doing enough?
We are still behind in the adoption but we are catching up, especially through the professional bodies; the professional bodies are assisting. We are promoting it so that people can understand it and then be able to embrace it. You don’t have to be doing everything and breaking your neck using your T-square and your drawing boards, not even using AutoCAD anymore, but there are more smarter and intelligent applications which embrace AI.
We have something called adaptive technology. What it does is if a customer gives me the concept that I want to do this particular project by the time I put that concept into the application, it gives me about five to seven other options.
I give you an example, one thing that usually gives landscape architects or engineers issues, is if you have a piece of land and you want a project on it and you want to design a car park on that piece of land. The land can be irregular, so how do you now arrange how cars will be parked? It’s always a problem so the application automatically gives you different options of how cars can be managed and parked around that facility on that same piece of land.
We have been promoting the adoption of technology in the industry by organising conferences like the Smart City Conference that we hold yearly. We also do this by engaging with educational institutions like universities. Presently, we have collaboration with UNILAG, University of Maiduguri, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, among others. Other ways we do this also is by collaborating with corporate bodies like the Nigerian Society of Engineers, Nigerian Institute of Architects, among others.
We do this by providing insights, advocacy, training and also implementations of these products from Autodesk and Oracle. We have an Oracle database and Construction Engineering Global Business Unit. That part of it includes only projects and project management solutions.
What we do is try to meet people, let people understand technology can help them in their processes and applications in mitigating their risks and getting work done on time, fewer budgets, less waste and all that. We also have training facilities to get people acquainted with these technologies, get them started on time and that is what led to the universities we talked about so that we can get these to the students on time, then get them started before they get into the market.
So, what Costech also does is try to bridge the gap between academia and the industry. We know what is obtainable in the industry and then we try to help our students get prepared so that when they graduate, they are able to do what they want.
