(This is an article published in Clement Hii’s Facebook on 5 September 2024.)

Being in the property development industry, I have noted that the increasing costs of construction is a huge challenge both to developers and home buyers. More than just the profit margin, I believe property developers also have a social responsibility to ease the burden of home ownership for fellow Malaysians, by not conveniently passing the rising costs to the end users.

I think such an effort is best advanced via value engineering with the objective to bring down the cost of construction through efficient and effective design, use of resources as well as alternative materials. In fact, the concept of using real-world data and technology without compromising the quality of the overall project isn’t new.

But a value engineering app driven by the technological aspects of big data and artificial intelligence is quite novel, and could be a game changer. It has been something of both an obsession and a bother to me for quite sometime. I believe this is one area that will be more than just complementary to the construction industry, and we’ve assembled a separate dedicated team to focus on its workability.

We’ve therefore created Quantrix to spearhead this initiative. The unique platform has been built with our tech partners Ravi Kumar and Mohammed Hamada, seen here with Foong Peng Yew, our Managing Director, Property & Projects. What happens when tenders for each construction job, which can run into the hundreds of millions, are reduced by 5 to 10%?

Our biggest contract to a single main contractor was RM435 million, among the many construction awards HCK Capital Group has given out over the past few years. If effective value engineering is successfully implemented, the savings for each package could be enormous. They say anyone with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds. I look at it differently – I think there’re no real new ideas. There’re only new ways of making existing ideas work, better and more holistically.