Construction Industry Authority of the Philippines

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CIAP automates mission-critical processes with the help of FPI and WeServ

The key to modernizing governance in the public sector is access to the right information at the right time and the right place. With the help of technology, the information age is slowly revolutionizing the way government is conducted. This revolution has taken hold in the Construction Industry Authority of the Philippines (CIAP) under the wings of the Department of Trade and Industry.

New I.T. systems from Fujitsu Philippines, Inc. and its software development subsidiary, WeServ Systems International, Inc., aim to automate critical processes that will greatly benefit CIAP's mandate to serve the construction industry and the general public.

From manual to complete automation

• The CIAP was created to promote, accelerate, and regulate the growth and development of the construction industry. It exercises jurisdiction and supervision over the following implementing boards:
• Philippine Contractors Accreditation Board (PCAB), which issues, suspends, and revokes licenses of contractors;
• Philippine Domestic Construction Board (PDCB), tasked to formulate, recommend, and implement policies, guidelines, plans, and programs for the efficient implementation of public and private construction in the country;
• Philippine Overseas Construction Board (POCB), tasked to formulate strategies and programs for developing the country's overseas construction industry; and,
• Construction Industry Arbitration Commission (CIAC), which takes charge of disputes arising from, or connected with government and private contracts.

Kathryn Josephine Tajon-Dela Cruz, officer-in-charge of CIAP, said the automation of specialized processes is critical to the agency's information requirements. CIAP contracted FPI to develop and implement three important specialized systems. These specialized systems include the Contractors Project Performance Information System (CPIS), an information storage and retrieval system; the Contractors Financial Information System (CFIS), a storage, retrieval, and numeric processing system; and, the Market and Policies Information System (MPIS).

In the past, CIAP has been manually processing administrative, as well as contractors' information to analyze their financial and business performance. At present, CIAP has around 7,000 to 9,000 contractors in its wings, providing market information, project tracking, and promoting contractual relationships between government project owners and contractors, both here and abroad. "Information is vital. We give recommendations and provide policies for the construction industry. The public also expects us to provide status of the industry. We manually process this information," said Dela Cruz. "We get the information from the National Statistics Office but we could not easily play around with the data by comparing certain figures, extracting information with economic figures."

Dela Cruz stressed that capturing and analyzing data manually was very tedious. "Every year, we are expected to join regional conferences but before we participate, we need to come up with an industry report. With manual processing, we have to wait for a long time before we consolidate the needed information. Sometimes, the information comes in at the last minute, even during departure time at the airport in a worse case scenario." Details on new systems

The CIAP organization is composed of 84 people, with contractuals hired on a monthly basis to help the agency in encoding contractors' data and even in manual evaluation of contractor application for licensing. The bulk of applications come in droves, from 5,000 out of the 9,000 contractors, in the month of June, which is the deadline month for applying or renewing of contractor licenses. With CPIS, a computer-based information storage and retrieval system, CIAP aims to provide comprehensive details about contractors' project performance for pre-qualification purposes. The system interfaces with the contractors licensing system to draw the general information of contractors, while other detailed and pre-qualification related information are established by the user. Most of the outputs of this system are for public consumption and are in a form ready for information sharing through electronic mail and print-outs.

Vision and challenges

Lilian G. Salonga, supervising trade and industry development specialist and head of CIAP's Research and Information Division, envisions the CIAP processes to be implemented into two major phases - automation first, then become interactive. "We have to automate first before we can even tell people to apply online through the Internet, to check the data or pay the application fees without coming to the office. We call it e-CIAP."CIAP's plan is to pattern its entire system infrastructure to that of the Ministry of Construction in Japan. "We want to make Japan as a model with other ASEAN countries. In Asia, Japan has one of the biggest construction industries worldwide. The country is the leader in Asia with regard to innovations and technologies in the construction business," adds Salonga.

Dela Cruz said CIAP's main challenge is to establish an easy link between integration with the contractors' side. "The challenge is trying to get people to accept a change in the way they do their work. Although our employees know that computers are able to do these things, they feel an apprehension that these machines can replace them sooner or later."

She added that other fears like there might be somebody who can easily hack into the system and produce results that would put them in a precarious position, is another challenge that CIAP employees will have to overcome. The hardest part for Dela Cruz was having the evaluators encode the needed information so computers can generate the reports. "There is also a paradigm shift necessary. Most of our evaluators believe that the computer is only for clerks. There is a difference between being an evaluator and an encoder. They were made to encode, which they felt was a downgraded job when asked to do so."

CIAP targets year 2003 to put online all of the agency's services. Dela Cruz said CIAP has authority to enhance and upgrade the construction industry. But one of the necessary strategies is the IT infrastructure to connect other infra-agencies to CIAP - quite necessary to exchange information with other government agencies to improve the construction industry.

"If this is successful, we can also make arrangements with other agencies like the Department of Transportation and Communication (DOTC) and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) to remotely share and access construction data," she continued.

Direct inputting and direct access - no more paper, no more waiting for people to duplicate the work. A vision of no redundancies nor wasteful time to make information accessible to the right people - and this is CIAP's vision and hopefully with FPI and WeServ's help, the job gets done in real time.

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