Robin Village: Streamlining the Precast Fabrication Workflow with Trimble Connect Extension

One of the leading providers of precast solutions in Singapore, Robin Village Development has been a pioneer on many fronts, the latest being its successful implementation of a smart BIMbased solution for the shop drawings stage of its precast fabrication.  A wholly owned subsidiary of Tiong Seng Group, one of Singapore’s leading precast contractors – Robin Village Development Pte Ltd (RVD) has over 13 years of experience in precast and prefabricated engineering design and solutions.

RVD has an extensive portfolio that range from high-rise apartments, commercial buildings to hotels and resorts. Some of the landmark projects it has been involved in include the integrated Resorts World Sentosa, Park Royal@Pickering, Gardens by the Bay and Capita Green. In 2012, Robin Village Development made history by establishing Singapore’s first integrated precast facility, the Tiong Seng Prefab Hub. It is at present, the country’s first integrated construction and prefabrication hub (ICPH), designed to optimise land use as well as to improve work efficiency through the mechanisation of plant operations.

The Tiong Seng Prefab Hub is a state-of-the-art facility that brings together precast and prefabrication production, the design team, formwork assembly and maintenance, training and research, all under one roof.

This deep integration of the entire precast and prefab operations has enabled the company to tightly control the standards and processes for every component, allowing them to deliver high-quality precast components to their customers.

THE NEED FOR A SMART BIM-BASED SHOP DRAWING SUBMISSION SOLUTION

Seeking greater efficiency and leaner processes, RVD looked to improve on a key process in precast fabrication – the generation, submissions and approvals of shop drawings. After researching various solutions available, the team chose Trimble Connect as the cloud-based collaborative platform to implement a solution that would be central to its production planning and shop drawing processes. The shop drawing stage is a time-consuming but critical aspect of precast fabrication. To ensure construction quality and efficiency, a purpose-built solution was developed to ensure:

- A full audit trail of shop drawing versioning
- Status traceability of submissions and approvals
- A streamlined approval process
- Accurate dissemination of shop drawing for production

This bespoke solution addresses three key areas: greater collaboration between approving consultants and submitting contractors; improved communication by automating both internal and external coordination on shop drawing status; and providing an accurate single source of information by centralising shop drawings into a single repository on the cloud.

BENEFITS FROM A RE-ENGINEERED WORKFLOW

Since implementing this purpose-built cloud-based solution with Trimble Connect, RVD has seen significant productivity gains of up to 36%. In terms of moving towards a leaner practice, the average processing and wait times in the typical submission-approval workflow have been shortened by 40% and 30% respectively

“With the newly developed shop drawing submission application, our structural engineers and precast fabricators are able to e!ectively collaborate through the cloud to communicate, endorse and track shop drawings in real-time. Having a single repository for shop drawings also improves transparency, consistency, accuracy and the traceability of fabrication information. In short, it has greatly smoothened what has typically been a complicated and time-consuming process.”

 Evelyn Seah, Robin Village Development Pte Ltd