Welcome

The Stanford Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) Summer Program annually teaches Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC) and Facility Management (FM) professionals how to use and obtain project and business benefits from strategic Information Technology. This year, we are pleased to offer the program twice:

Session I in Finland, June 9-13 (includes company visits and workship days).
Session II at Stanford, September 10-11.

The topic will be "Implementing VDC Broadly: Moving to 2010"

Changing demands in the marketplace, new project delivery models, and advancing technologies continue to shape the competitive landscape of the construction industry and define new benchmarks for leading-edge performance by firms and project teams. These marketplace changes and classic business drivers now strongly motivate and enable disruptive change in both strategy and methods. Recent survey results show that Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) has now entered the mainstream of design - construction practice, and some AEC organizations now thrive having derived significant competitive advantage from effective use of VDC and having a strategy to gain value from its use. Failure to implement the right mix of disruptive strategy and methods almost surely will initiate the demise of others.

As of 2006, CIFE members routinely have strategic plans for VDC and use the first Visualization stage of VDC confidently. The Summer Program focuses on the next incremental step toward the 2015 CIFE breakthrough performance goals, which are that in 2010, CIFE members will:

Operate with a strategic plan to implement VDC broadly and will manage by public and explicit model-based process metrics in latency, safety, quality, schedule, cost and sustainability.
Use second (Integration) stage of VDC confidently and will simultaneously serve >= 5 business purposes on >=10 major projects/year, e.g., architecture, safety, schedule, space use, energy.
Pilot third (Automation) stage of VDC and automate >30% of routine design and construction activity (wrt 2006 baseline) on > 2 pilot projects/year.
Staff each project with four VDC trained engineers.

The Summer Program will discuss specific work being done today that support each of these goals and have specific activities in which participants plan their own work to achieve these and any other goals they have for the next few years.

Like last year, the program duration is short: two and a half days, to allow participation with a minimal disruption of normal work routines.

Who should attend

The Summer Program will be of value to middle and senior management with an interest in the use of information technology in construction projects. Participants will represent project stakeholders such as:

Facility Owners
General contractors
Designers
Major subcontractors
Technology vendor organizations

The best way for a company to participate is to send a team of four or more that represents multiple skills and responsibilities. The team can then return and work as a coalition that collaboratively will advance VDC use more effectively than any enthusiastic individuals.

Last updated: May 20, 2008..