RED SEA GLOBAL: NEW QUALITY STANDARDS AND A WORLD FIRST!

THE RED SEA IS A NEW TYPE OF DEVELOPMENT WITH A MISSION TO EMPHASIZE BOTH PEOPLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT, AND IN DOING SO IT IS BREAKING THE MOULD FOR REGENERATIVE TOURISM IN SEVERAL IMPORTANT AND GROUNDBREAKING WAYS. SAUDI PROJECTS SPOKE TO FAISAL BUTT, PROJECTS DELIVERY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, RED SEA GLOBAL (RSG), FIRST ASKING HIM ABOUT THE NEW AIRPORT EXPERIENCE VISITORS WILL ENJOY; AN EXPERIENCE THAT WILL TOTALLY TRANSFORM THEIR JOURNEY.

“We wanted to make the arrival experience more memorable and much more enjoyable. The biggest pain for most people when they arrive at an airport, often with children in tow, is the wait for bags. There can be quite a delay before the baggage carousel starts moving, and even then you can be stood there for some time waiting for your particular bags to appear. All you want to do is get to the hotel, enjoy the beach, and sit by the pool, so we decided to look at how we could reduce or even remove all of this hassle.”

The result is that when visitors arrive at the international terminal, they don’t actually need to pick their bags up and can bypass the baggage carousel completely. Sounds heavenly, right? It is because at the arrival point the baggage management system will ensure that all bags go to the chosen resort - the airport knows that Mr and Mrs X are going to Six Senses and their bags will meet them there. This a unique offering compared to traditional airports and makes the whole journey far more pleasurable.

Of course, if you get nostalgic for the ‘old way’, that’s fine too. You’ll be able to wait next to the carousel until your bags emerge, but we can’t imagine too many people taking that option.

“This took a lot of work and a lot of simulation,” Faisal explains, “because this is a very different way of looking at how you are going to handle baggage. But it’s going to be worth it for all of the people traveling to The Red Sea.”

BECOMING THE MAIN CONTRACTOR

RSG is handling over a dozen projects along the Red Sea coast, with The Red Sea resort on target to welcome visitors by early 2023. Yet how has this been achieved in such a relatively short space of time - The Red Sea is encircled by the world's fourth-largest barrier reef system and encompasses over 28,000 square kilometres, with more than 90 unspoilt islands, magnificent beaches, dormant volcanoes, wide dunes, mountain valleys, and historical cultural monuments. It is a big task!

“From day one, our philosophy revolved around delivering this project differently,” Faisal says. “We quickly realized that market capacity is in short supply right now. There is a huge demand for contractors and laborers based on the pipeline of projects, announced projects, and the projects that are actually happening on the ground today. At the same time, there isn’t capacity on the supply side either. So at some point, you have an issue with market capacity and that is reflected in pricing, which can result in hundreds of multiples. This had a knock-on effect that saw us going back and re-packaging and retendering, so we said, how do we break this?

“We went the traditional route at first with main contractors. However, for any given asset we have between 15 and maybe 20 construction packages, so essentially you have up to 20 contracts being managed on a single asset. That’s unheard of in this market. So what we’ve done is gone directly to the tier two and tier three contractors, who do the work for us.

This comes with a risk because tiers two and three are probably not able to execute that quality, but that’s where we come in.

“It’s why RSG has built an in-house team of construction managers, project managers, and engineers. We have grown from a handful of people in 2017 to over two thousand today, all to build an in-house capability. The result is that now we are the main contractor; we are going to manage our projects and manage the sub-contractors as any other contractor does.

This has shifted our focus into construction management where we can have the supply chain drive those packages to completion. It’s also allowed us to remove those hefty margins that the main contractors in the market charge us.”

Naturally, giga-projects such as this present not only challenges but lessons, and things have certainly been taken on board by RSG to allow the company to be even more effective and successful in the future.

“In a way, we are upscaling the supply chain. Those guys who never had a chance to work directly with a client, who previously weren’t perhaps paid on time by the contractor, can develop their businesses, and this is essentially a part of what we’re doing - upscaling the supply chain, upscaling the market, contributing to the GDP, not only by selling hotels and hotel room rates but also by upscaling the construction industry,” Faisal says.

NEW CONCEPTS, NEW STANDARDS

Because of the restrictions and difficulties of some of the environmental projects, new standards have been put in place by RSG, but how much has been imposed upon the company by the authorities and how much is self-imposed?

“I think our standards are well above what the local standards are,” Faisal begins. “The Saudi Building Code is comprehensive, so we created a bespoke building code that is a combination of the Saudi and international building codes. We did this because we want to put ourselves at a higher standard, and that’s what we now follow across all of our work.”

It’s the same with the environmental aspects. RSG began talking to the National Environmental Committee, which approves all of the company’s impact environmental assessments, four or five years ago to start creating a framework on how to manage environmental impact and monitoring. “Nothing had ever been built on a Saudi marine site before, so it was a new thing for them too,” Faisal says.

“Island development is a new concept in Saudi Arabia, especially in an environment that is considered so sensitive and home to some of the most endangered species in the world. Some species of migratory birds only come to this part of the Red Sea once a year. Therefore, we needed to consider all of these things and the environmental regulations that we are following are the first of their kind in the Kingdom.”

A World First

RSG is nothing if not an innovative and forward-looking developer and is justly proud of a number of the initiatives it has introduced to the Red Sea, one of the most impressive being the relocation of coral. “There is a very dense population of coral, and in certain areas where we need to develop, whether it’s subsea cabling or perhaps the bridge, there was coral in those locations,” Faisal explains. “As much as we tried to avoid certain places, there are some locations where it simply isn’t possible. That’s where the whole notion of taking coral from one location and replanting it in another location arose.

“Working with a lot of experts from around the world, we discovered that there was mixed success with the survival rate of the coral when moved. A lot of the time when you relocate coral from one environment to another, bringing it from an open sea environment to a lab environment, for instance, the changes in mineral content in the water, the temperature, and the salinity mean that the coral eventually dies.

“After maybe three and a half years of experimenting with small coral sample sizes, we finally found a method with a company by the name of Beacon Development to relocate a large volume of coral from one area of the sea to another. We didn’t have to bring coral back into the lab and then back to the sea, it was from one point to another point. We needed to check the mortality rate, in four and a half or five months, to see if the coral was acclimatizing to the conditions. If not, it would die. And it’s been nine months now and that program has been incredibly successful. That is a world first.”

The World Tourism Organization has called for the industry to look beyond visitor numbers and profit, and instead focus on the positive impact that healthy tourism can have on people, society and the environment. Red Sea Global can provide the blueprint for this vision.

The Value Of Bim And Its Utilization At Red Sea Global

UILDING INFORMATION MODELING (BIM) IS THE FOUNDATION OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE ARCHITECTURE, ENGINEERING, AND CONSTRUCTION SECTORS, A PROCESS FOR CREATING AND MANAGING INFORMATION ON A CONSTRUCTION PROJECT THROUGHOUT ITS WHOLE LIFECYCLE. SAUDI PROJECTS SPOKE TO MOHAMMED DAWOOD ALDAWOOD, SENIOR BUILDING INFORMATION

B

MODELING MANAGER – DIGITAL DELIVERY, AT RED SEA GLOBAL (RSG) TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THIS UBIQUITOUS BUT OFTEN MISUNDERSTOOD TOPIC.

Saudi Projects: How easy is BIM to implement in a human resources way, as the typical top-down organizational chart won’t work for BIM because more collaboration is required. Does this become a barrier because old practices die hard?

Mohammed Dawood Aldawood: BIM implementation requires process harmony in and across organizations. It is no different to any other digital transformation program. These initiatives are often disruptive to businesses because it requires a change from established ways of working, and pushes people from their comfort zone, resulting in fear and a slow-down in progress.

 Offers project information components integrity using information classification systems

 Has defined level of information need in terms of 3D and information

The 3D model without the BIM framework would be just geometry. That alone cannot be leveraged to higher value BIM uses such as coordination, cost, scheduling, energy modelling, or sustainability advantages where high-quality BIM models are the gateway to unlock the data value.

However, transformation drivers should be supported by strategic leadership such as visible top management ‘buy-in’ to the vision, a coherent digital strategy, and the people skills improvement required, otherwise the BIM maturity in the organization won’t have the right catalysts to succeed. If this can be achieved, all parties in the organization can see the benefits for them personally as well as the overall project mission.

SP: What is the difference between 3D and BIM?

MDA: This is the most confusing part of the AEC industry! 3D is a subset of the overall BIM Framework.

The BIM framework:

 Assures business strategy to set scope expectations

 Assures proper contractual engagement across the project participants, depending on the project procurement method

 Provides clear direction on what data should be shared, when, to whom, and for what purpose

SP: What are some of the benefits of BIM for RSG?

MDA: There are some inherent benefits in improved collaboration through sharing data globally and creating efficiencies through the alignment of processes in the supply chain.

But the main benefits we see are:

 Coordinated optimized designs

 Greater opportunity for early engagement in the supply chain

 Optimized material selection and usage thus reducing waste

 Higher quality information handover leading to reduced rework and improved handover

 Automation of repetitive low-value tasks

 Improved data-driven decision making

 Greater transparency of progress in design and construction

 Improved safety and efficiency on-site through improved logistics and planning

SP: BIM can’t solve the climate crisis, but it can downsize the building industry’s carbon footprint. So, BIM fits in nicely with the whole RSG ethos?

MDA: BIM fits well as an organized source of information in RSG through the project lifecycle leading towards optimized material selection, iterative simulations to improve efficiency, and data to enable our environmental teams to make better-informed decisions. Specifically, BIM has enabled the greater use of off-site manufacturing resulting in safer work in controlled environments that reduce waste and improve quality of product.

This is not enough though. The industry needs to push for more digital transformation in the manufacturing sector to define standardized information exchange and databases to connect with the BIM model. Such achievements would bring huge opportunities to optimize the equipment and material selection using BIM and energy simulation applications.

Improved technology interoperability would enable the tools to communicate in the same schema language, and is a matter that hundreds of organizations are working on currently under the leadership of building SMART. This is an important sustainable digital milestone that governments, clients, engineers, manufacturers and vendors should mandate and push forward to achieve an optimum interoperability exchange between applications.

Such achievements would allow innovators and climate change stewards to collaborate like never before to solve challenging climate problems.

SP: Most contractors appear to be utilizing BIM through ‘partial uses’ (virtual mock-ups, scope clarification etc.), which seem to be almost infinite. What are some of the uses of BIM at RSG? Can you give a couple of examples?

MDA: There are seemingly infinite opportunities to harness the value in the data, but it comes down to what you are trying to achieve on your projects, and really understanding what would provide value for you. Is it an acceleration of delivery, quality or reduced cost? What does the organizational strategy aim to achieve? How mature is your company and the supply chain you work with?

On our projects we are focused on:

 Coordination reviews

 Constructability reviews

 3D walk-throughs focused on guest experience

 BIM construction scheduling and simulation

 Dynamic cost modeling for analysis and estimates

 Design for manufacture and assembly techniques, linking designs directly for manufacturers to use in their machines

 Handover of data between stages, specifically design to construction and construction to handover

SP: What type of software are you using for BIM at RSG?

MDA: Our largest platform is the Common Data Environment that we provide for all project stakeholders. This platform allows all of our project partners to share data in a controlled manner, using a common language (ISO19650), and accelerates the design process. By providing this for all, it removes a barrier for our supply chain to work with us in a collaborative manner. We also use design and visualization tools to identify, track and resolve design and constructability issues. This has been invaluable when working on a fast-track construction project as decision-makers can rapidly affect project outcomes with high-quality data.

SP: What is the biggest challenge in implementing BIM?

MDA: Globally, the biggest challenge is to achieve an integrated BIM framework that harmonizes some of the good practice work that is delivered by the best minds in our industry.

This would require strong foundations and human expertise that understand the challenges we all face and that can leverage digital opportunities to transform the work we all do. There is also a skills shortage globally of talented BIM professionals that can really drive project outcomes, be innovative and manage the organizational change aspects of any transformation.

I believe the specific challenge in Saudi Arabia is that we do not have a general authority of BIM to organize the national efforts in achieving BIM.

This vacuum results in investment distraction in the supply chain, slowing down progress and limiting the BIM potential.

At RSG we have formed working groups with a number of external stakeholders to exchange knowledge and seek standardization opportunities both on process and technology. But this needs to accelerate to really have an impact on the delivery capacity and capability in the Kingdom. It would be great to see more organizations leaning in and helping us to deliver this vision.

A positive stand happened this year when Saudi Contractors Authority took leadership and organized several BIM exhibits and workshops bringing stakeholders together. Personally, I would love to see these efforts translate into BIM working groups represented by all SCA members to drive national BIM and information management standardization. This shift from ‘closed communities’ to ‘open communities’ to achieve a higher level of integration, collectively identifying common gaps and common approaches of resolutions would accelerate the adoption of a BIM framework and related technologies.

SP: Is BIM the future?

MDA: Regardless of the name, yes digitally transformed project delivery is the future. The future for believers in data-driven decisions. The future for believers in data for certain long-term decisions. The future for believers in data as the new digital economy.