VEWA: value engineering web-based application

摘要

Construction industry is the main economic activity in Malaysia, which is one of the catalysts to create economic growth and assist Malaysia to become a developed nation by the year 2020. To achieve this vision, construction industry in Malaysia must improve itself and overcome some problems that often prevent achieving of good productivity. To increase the quality and optimize the value of constructions project, a strong integration of the independent parties involved is needed. The parties involved must work together due to dependencies within each party. Therefore, Value Engineering (VE), which is a method in coordinating professionals from different disciplines, has to be applied during the design and constraction process. VE can provide considerable benefit to construction projects and increase customer satisfaction if it is structured in the right manner. This requires a strongly multidisciplinary and team-oriented approach by all the parties to the project. During the VE processes, the parties involved have to analyze, manage and store a lot of data. It is time consuming and taken many efforts to run the VE processes effectively. The parties have to pay more attention to make sure the VE processes ran smoothly. Therefore, an effective and versatile VE system is needed in order to ran VE analysis; communicate all parties involved in the VE processes; manage, use and secure VE data; and can manage changes if occurred. By using the Internet, the communication and data transfer between the parties involved can be performed. A web-based application can assist VE process in more accurate and efficient way. This paper describes the initial stage towards computerization of VE processes, into the current practice of VE in Malaysia. A prototype systems, VEWA has been developed to demonstrate the VE concept through web-based application.