Innovation

Developing mobile apps to boost productivity and safety on coastal projects

app

(Above) SJ’s coastal engineers are now developing mobile apps to help them monitor projects. (Below) A web view of the icoVIEW app, showing the gallery for uploading and viewing project photos and videos.

ICODID Web Gallery

To help its engineers monitor its projects, improve safety, manage talent and use data analysis to identify trends in projects, Surbana Jurong’s Coastal Engineering team has developed a suite of mobile apps to help do so – while cutting paperwork and increasing productivity.

Suite of apps

ICODID, or “Integrated Construction Digital Delivery”, these apps are four web-based and mobile-based applications built for Construction Site Supervision and Management. 

The first app is icoCARE, a safety-focused app that allows projects to keep track of safety-related matters. Next, icoQA is a site inspection app that allows engineers to customise their inspection forms. For instance, in the case of inspecting a structure using rebars (reinforcing steel bars used in reinforced concrete), the engineer can customise the app to inspect the spacing between them.

The third app is icoPEOPLE, a talent management tool that generates rosters and digital timesheets. The icoVIEW app consolidates data and connects data from various sources for the coastal engineers to make sense of a project’s status. The team has plans to introduce more apps into the ICODID suite. 

The app development work was led by Mr Choo Wei Yan, Senior Executive Project Manager (Digital Transformation) of the SJ Coastal Engineering team. He spent months working as part of various teams to understand the processes before he started designing the apps.

Image of Wei Yan

(Above) Senior Executive Project Manager (Digital Transformation) of SJ Coastal Engineering team. Choo Wei Yam, led the development of these apps.

 

Digitalisation benefits

It has taken two years to iterate and develop the apps. Currently, about 10 projects are using a mix of different apps. Benefits are already showing as clients and the engineers need not labour through stacks of timesheets to verify attendance. Supervision on site, including safety reviews, is carried out systematically and digitally captured for follow-ups and analysis. 

Mr James Lam, Managing Director of Coastal Engineering, said that the digitalisation drive is vital to raise productivity as the industry faces a talent crunch. He said: “Our projects are highly significant ones dealing with large-scale coastal infrastructure, reclamation and climate change impacts. As we scale, it is vital to keep up with the trends and harness the data for insights to help our clients achieve better outcomes from their projects.” 

As the coastal team consolidates data on a digital platform, they are exploring the use of data analytics to identify trends and make data-driven decisions when managing projects.

Plans to enhance app offerings 

The four apps, icocare, icopeople, icoview and icoQA are available on Play Store and Apple App Store. Said Mr Choo, “Right now our focus is to beef up our app capabilities and target adoption internally first, which will boost our productivity and quality delivery of our work.”

Project Contact:
James Lam| Managing Director – Coastal Engineering
Surbana Jurong
E: [email protected]

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