Exploring Digital Construction Workflows for Project Lifecycle Implementation: The Forest City Perspective

Digital construction implementation has not yet realized its promised potential after three decades. Across the entire project lifecycle, adoption has encountered difficulties from high-level standard guidance, a lack of strategies, fragmented delivery approaches, and insufficient digital delivery competency. Establishing digital workflows tailored to organizations’ contexts is an essential linkage of the information layer to synthesize the business and technology layers to address these challenges within the ISO 19650 framework. The uneven implementation of building information modelling (BIM) in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operation (AECO) industry provides a holistic perspective to consider the digitalization workflow dynamics. This report performs a case study through a parallel approach to examining multiple projects’ digital construction implementation of an organization in the Forest City development. Applying an observation research method and real-world data of project records, it analyses its workflows’ digitalization and process digitization, combining with its organization’s structure and overall project strategy. Moreover, it highlights bespoke digital construction ecosystems and relevant stakeholders to streamline workflows. The digital construction implementation results and project benefits as project context indicators verify that fundamental digital workflows of design quality checking, project optimization, asset data collection, and defect management have significant applicability compared with the advanced workflows of integrated 5D cost management and precast design and production. Their adoptability keeps consistency with those of applicability using the extra cost, application complexity, and disruption level indicators from the technology–organization–environment (TOE) framework to measure. These multiple project studies reveal the feasibility for organizations to achieve lifecycle digital construction implementation competency. The feasibility is underpinned by introducing an in-house digital engineering team to organization structure, cultivating applicable digital delivery capabilities through workflows digitalization and process digitization, and synthesizing ISO 19650 with workflows to enable more contextualized digital construction implementation.