Scaling Up Digitally: The Story of LSW Consulting Engineers

LSW Consulting Engineers Pte has a storied 29-year history for providing practical and economical engineering. With the adoption of technologies, LSW has successfully transformed to a firm which can handle larger public projects. 

“We needed a way for our team to mostly remain the same size, while scaling up to be able to handle more and bigger projects, and technology was the key to this”, said LSW Managing Director, Mr. Lauw Su Wee. In turning to technology, LSW were perhaps one of the few that began their Integrated Digital Delivery (IDD) journey well before the term was first coined, and put on the national agenda by the Singapore Government.

LSW has adopted Tekla solutions and the process took 3 years to reach a point where it could be fully adopted across all their projects, as well as to get their staff fully trained. Two recent projects were the 17 residential blocks at Tengah with 1630 units that LSW took up in 2017.  It was a huge project which required massive manpower.  Instead of doing it in conventional way, LSW has adopted Tekla and maintained a lean team of 5 engineers and 5 drafters in completing the tender within the time frame.  There was at least 30% productivity gain.

Another project was on the infrastructure side. LSW was involved in a project to widen a highway, with the construction of a new flyover with 4 slip roads. Here, Tekla solutions provided a huge advantage in the modelling of complex rebar arrangements, visualizing and quickly assessing clashes, allowing their engineers to create high-quality clash free engineering drawings that are ready for construction.  Moreover, LSW was also able to meet the LOD400 requirement.

The results from these two projects show the clear benefits of adopting technology such as Tekla – it empowers scalability and growth in LSW’s consultancy scope and offerings, and it has reduced business risk as well as to help LSW stay competitive.