Saving Hours in Reviewing Construction Digitalisation Reports with Pair Chat

The Building and Construction Authority (BCA) in Singapore is harnessing the power of Pair to streamline its process for reviewing Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD) reports from industry stakeholders. This innovative use of AI technology is significantly enhancing efficiency and consistency in evaluating these reports.

BCA: Shaping Singapore's built environment

The Building and Construction Authority (BCA) is a statutory board under Singapore's Ministry of National Development. It plays a crucial role in developing and regulating Singapore's Built Environment sector. BCA's mission is to transform the Built Environment sector and shape a liveable and smart Built Environment for Singapore.

Figure 1: Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD) in Singapore

One of BCA's key initiatives is the promotion of Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD), a key part of Singapore's Built Environment Industry Transformation Map. IDD leverages digital technologies and processes to integrate work processes and connect stakeholders working on the same project throughout the construction and building lifecycle.

Enhancing Report Review Process

BCA's Digitalisation (DIGI) department is responsible for reviewing extensive IDD reports submitted by various Contractors, Consultants and Clients. These reports are evaluated against a set of digital use cases that the submitting parties have committed to implement.

Senior Manager Nikki Yong from BCA's DIGI explains, ”Manually reviewing lengthy reports is time-consuming and prone to human error. With Pair, we have a solution that streamlines this process without compromising accuracy. It provides a concise summary of each report and flags potential gaps in the fulfilment of the implementation requirements.”

Figure 2: Pair is able to learn from past reviews and generate insights for new reports

Conducting specialised analysis on uploaded documents

Pair's capability to rapidly process and analyse unstructured reports proves to be an asset for the BCA team. Officers can simply upload existing documents on Pair Chat to summarise content, analyse requirements or obtain insights.

Nikki explains, ”Pair not only summarises the reports but also helps draft initial responses in our required format, serving as an excellent starting point. As we've begun feeding it some of our past responses for analysis, Pair can also identify potential gaps in the proposals and offer recommendations. This feature has sparked considerable interest as it offers the potential to both expedite our evaluation procedures and enhance the depth of our analysis.”

Saving officers hours in report reviewing time

The impact of using Pair for IDD report reviews has been significant. Nikki reports, ” Tasks that collectively used to take hours can now be completed in minutes.”

This efficiency gain is particularly crucial given the high volume of reports BCA officers must review. By automating the initial analysis, officers can focus their expertise on evaluating the quality and feasibility of the proposed implementations, rather than spending time on basic information extraction.

As Pair analyses more IDD Implementation Plan reports, it can improve in identifying gaps and generating recommendations. This AI-driven capability could streamline the review process, highlighting missing use cases, suggesting improvements, and enhancing overall IDD implementation across projects.

Streamlining repetitive work across BCA with Pair Assistants

Encouraged by the possibility of using Pair for IDD report reviews, BCA's Digitalisation team is already exploring other applications beyond summarising reports, such as turning Pair into a reliable advisor for new officers assigned to reviewing these reports. New entrants to the Department will be able to handle report review tasks with the help of Pair Assistant – a feature that allows officers to create specialised LLM assistants for high repetitive and customised tasks.

Figure 3: With Pair Assistant, BCA's DIGI Team can easily create and train specialised advisors

Similar methods utilising Pair can be applied towards assessing reports against Sustainability, Buildability, and Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) requirements, and more.

Feeding many relevant past reports into Pair presents another opportunity to create a robust knowledge base not just for BCA officers, but for firms wanting to learn about IDD for the first time.

In conclusion, Pair stands out as a secure, efficient, and user-friendly platform that can be applied to enhance work processes.