ITC's Digital Transformation Journey: Achieving Kitemark Certification for ISO 19650—Being the First and Beyond

MADHU ARAVIND: Hi, everybody. I'm Madhu. During the session, I'll try and cover my organization, ITC projects organizations, digital transformation journey, including our compliance to ISO 19650, achieving the prestigious Kitemark certification. Specifically deep diving into how to develop a comprehensive digital society for integrated digital delivery, including how to bring about traceable accountability and finally, getting into how to develop a BIM-first project from the ground up.

I'm a civil engineer with 17 years of experience. My passion for engineering is only matched by my love for adventure, whether it is traveling to new destinations or biking through scenic landscapes, I embrace every moment to explore and learn.

Our company is one of the largest ITC companies in India. We have diversified presence in food products, hotels, packaging, paperboard, and speciality papers and agribusiness. ITC Ltd. Is an exemplar in sustainable practices. We have been carbon positive, solid-waste positive, and water positive for last 19, 17, and 22 years. Our businesses create sustainable value chain for six million people, majority of whom are represented by the poorest Indian.

CO, which is Central Projects Organization, it is ITC's project arm. CPU is entrusted with doing the largest capital spends for ITC. We have completed close to 93 projects which that amount to 18,000,000 square feet form our inception in 2007. In the recent past, we have realized that there is a lack of quality PCM service providers in India, and we have started giving our services to people outside ITC. So that is part of our external business.

ITC Green Center Phase II Building 3 is one of the most advanced projects in terms of sustainability and digitalization under construction in the heart of Bangalore city in India. ITC limited is currently redeveloping a 100-year-old campus and the proposed master plan has seven buildings, six commercial and one hotel.

As part of the redevelopment, ITC has already completed two buildings that you see in blue. And we are in the endeavor of constructing the third building as part of phase II, which is seen in green. So the one big thing about this project is this project is the world's fourth and India's first Kitemark certified product.

So for those who want to understand what Kitemark is, British Standard Institute grants Kitemark for product and services, which meet a certain level of quality standard and safety standard. So they also provide a Kitemark for compliance to ISO 19650. Again, ISO 19650 is, again, a standard managing information over the entire life cycle of a built asset.

So we finished building 1 and 2 in 2018, using traditional collaboration completely on paper. And now that we are doing building 3, as part of phase II, we are completely digitalized. We moved away from any type of paper-bound collaboration. We don't print anything, including checklists. We also don't print any of the construction drawings. The irony of all this is, our company is in the business of making paper, so going paperless is kind of a departure from what you're supposed to do.

So let's look at a comparator. Now, phase I is 1,000,000 square feet, Phase II is 2.3 square feet. And both these projects are in the same location and are of similar complexity. So they are great for comparison. So I'll be doing a lot of comparison between these two projects because one is traditional and one is completely digital.

To add some context, I will tell you a few things about these two projects. Both projects are architecturally similar. They are both USGBC LEED platinum pre-certified. Phase II is targeted to be well-certified, as well. Phase I is a reinforced cement-concrete structure, and phase II is a composite steel structure.

So now let's deep dive into the problems faced by the Indian construction industry. As we all know, the $12 trillion AEC industry historically has been the slowest in adopting digital technology. This is because the fragmented processes and reliance on manual work and low investment on technology.

These things lead to the greatest problem of the construction industry, which is lack of predictability. The lack of predictability, directly or indirectly, leads to a plethora of problems. And these are some problems that I've listed here. But we believe that bringing predictability in time, cost, and quality can solve all these problems.

Also, the KPMG report for India said that there is a thrust on enhancing planning, rigor and implementing integrated project management information system. These are crucial steps. 72% of them felt that planning rigor has to be increased. We need to have confidence on project scope, schedules, and quantities. 52% felt that you need to have standardization in project risk management and controls.

There has been some progress in PMIs and data analytics in India and some progress in offsite manufacturing and modularity, but these too are far from being pathbreaking. In spite of understanding, recognizing the importance of technologies like BIM, the adoption rate for BIM is surprisingly low. 84% of the people felt that BIM is a differentiating technology, but only 27% have been able to implement it. This is because BIM is a collaborative process and an efficient information management system becomes very important in this.

So every project management team more often, find themselves asking this question, and most often it is attributable to the way the data is archived in the first place. To give you a real-life example, I was talking to you about phase I. The project was close to 90 million USD. And we had a package which was 37 million USD, so we had 16,000 checklists, 388 RFIs and 60 meetings, so whopping number.

And because claims are an inevitability in India, we also had a claim of five million. So additionally we had to churn through 30,000 emails, 5,000 plus photographs, 654 progress reports, and 142 contracts. We found we spent a whopping 20% of our time looking for documents, and I'm sure a lot of it was lost tracking deliverables. So let's look at the numbers a little further.

These are the two projects. We had 16,000 checklists in phase I, which is mostly paper bound. Today, in phase II, we are expecting 25,000 checklists. How did that happen? This is because once digitalization came into play, people broke down very big, complex checklists into small, achievable parts. So you see a big increase in the number of checklists.

We are hardly out of the basement, and we have finished 16,000 checklists. In phase I, I told you that there are 5,000-plus photographs. In phase II, we have 45,000 traceable photographs. That is because it has become traceable, it has become easy to upload, and this is the increase that we have seen. And out of that, 30,000 is connected to checklists.

So this itself kind of shows you what has happened just by a digitalization of going paperless. We had 142 contractual communications in phase I. Automatically, we were expecting that we will get 70 contractual communications in phase III. We got one. So contractor being party to such a good information management system and traceability did not raise any claims. And that is true transparency.

So getting into the next part of this, integrated digital delivery, digital transformation are the buzzwords today. But how do you get there? Well, you should have a well laid down strategy that can strike success. And this is important. So how do you go about creating this strategy?

Here at CPO, we believe that digital transformation strategy has to be the winning strategy. The digital transformation has to have a competitive advantage. Because if it is a winning strategy, it is capable of delivering success. And if you have a competitive edge, you can justify a return on investment.

Now, this is something that we had to solve first. So what we did was we looked at digital maturity. Every company has to go from being digitally indifferent, all the way to digitally native. So we went through all these steps. We believe that every company which is digitally native, is already ahead of the competition. This was our competitive advantage that we wanted to bring.

So when you have a cloud-first approach, or you want it to be committed to using digital tech, the first thing that you would do is you would standardize, you would create SOPs, which are quite regimented. You would say that this is how you have to work, this is how it would go, and stuff like that. So that is the first thing that we did.

But this definitely means that you have to alter the way you worked before, which is the cultural change that I'm talking. In CPO, we talk about cultural change as the third dimension. You have increasing digital maturity with competitive advantage. You have conforming to something like ISO 19650 on the top then you have cultural change as the third dimension.

What is cultural change? Some examples are it's in emails, it's in paperbound, collaboration, prioritizing transparency data democracy, and to have a unified schedule. These are cultural changes that we are talking.

So once you have culturally changed, what does it mean? It implies that you are supposed to change the existing SOPs. And once that is done, people will not be happy. And people have to be happy for your strategy to work. And this is the paradox that we face. And this is the paradox that CPO has been facing time and again.

So from a past experience of failing at digital transformation, we knew that we had to keep the regimental processes under check. And so at CPO, we actively wove in non-regimental processes so that we keep our people interested. So there is no need for change for some, and there is always leg room for innovating for some, and both these people are interested in it. So this is something that we wanted to achieve, and we did achieve.

Our digital transformation strategy also has a symbol. Why? A symbol increases recall value, and you can have all the stakeholders rallying behind this symbol. It also aims at dumbing down a very complex idea to make it sticky, so to say. And that is what we tried to do with this.

Our digital transformation symbol is called the digital pentagon, which has five areas design management, quality assurance, project management, project documentation, and digital procurement. Now once you create a symbol, you can start evolving it. This is how the digital pentagon looks today in 2024.

We have realized that project documentation has to be a single source of truth, and every document has to get into the single source of truth. And this is how we evolved. Now what has happened is once you establish this symbol, and people have started rallying behind this symbol, so it has become something like-- if you ask anybody in CPO and show them the digital pentagon, and they'll know. And this is how you get people to rally behind.

Also, the top part of our digital pentagon is completely digitalized thanks to Autodesk Construction Cloud. We are actively working at digitalizing our procurement and our project management.

Our procurement is completely manual now. That means that we still use emails, but we do use the Correspondence Module of ACC to do this to improve traceability. Project management, we have done a lot of progress in 4D and 5D. I intend to show you some glimpses of that. But rest of the project management, including taking budgetary decisions to cost to complete, that is still at large. We are still working on it.

So once a non-regimental process road was formed, it worked. We created a process or an SOP that was mostly non-regimented. Now, how do I say this? So let's look at this Venn disgram.

So I'm giving you a little bit of background of what regimental and non-regimental is/. Regimental processes are the processes which have too many written-down Non-regimental don't have any written-down rules. And there is also a gray area where you have some written rules.

So if you see the modules of ACC and how it is laid down in our SOP, you get the gist. There are only four items which are on the regimental part. And now when I overlay what is required for ISO 19650, you see, most of it is on the other side. And when I overlay which stakeholder works on which module, you see the difference.

The ones which are on regimental side, there are only two stakeholders working on one. Something like the sheets module where only ITC is working on it. It is only used to release [INAUDIBLE] drawings. I'll show you something on that as we go ahead.

And this is what makes it. Ensuring that all the regimental parts are kept very, very limited people so that those rules are followed and rest are kept non rule. So when I end this section, I want to leave you with a few insights.

Digital transformation has to be a competitive advantage. To look at digital maturity is really good to do it, and to have a symbol to dumb down a complex idea really works. Cultural change is inevitable. So very important to look at the balance between regimental and non-regimental processes.

So when it comes to ISO 19650, I want to get some basics out of the way. So the simple gist is, an appointing party joins with a sub-appointed parties and lead appointed parties to do information production, collaborate and create information production. Give it to the asset manager. This is the simple gist. This is what the process talks about.

ISO 19650 also talks about two stages, the delivery phase and the operational phase. In the delivery phase, you progressively create design and then you give it to asset manager for operational phase, the cyclic. Because no project starts with zero asset. And this is an amazing way of showing this.

And once you are compliant to ISO 19650, you automatically get compliant to ISO 21500 and 55000, which is for asset and project management. Then you have ISO 9001, the big ISO for organization management and [INAUDIBLE]. This came handy for us because CPO is an ISO 9001 certified organization. So we were already compliant. We brought in BIM, that was also compliant. So this is a beautiful thing about standards.

So let's deep dive into how we get there and how did we get there for ISO 19650. So basically, we took the whole roadmap and broke it down into six parts. The first step was assessment, where as an appointing party, [? IBC ?] created the context for information requirement. What we looked at?

We looked at mapping stakeholders. We looked at defining scope. We looked at LOI, Level Of Information. We brought in the common data environment. We looked at risk management, training plan gaps improvement. So these seven steps, we looked at it. And the output of the step was the BIM document.

Now, when you standardize information management on ISO 19650, here becomes the backbone. And [? REL ?] has three parts. One is the CDE, BEP, and the rest of the year. And this is a small content of what was there inside.

And once the year comes out of the assessment stage, the BEP is still a draft because we are waiting for the designers to come in to ensure that the BEP is airtight, and you have taken care of all the nuances. So we make the VP as a draft. And now we get into the tendering stage where we bring the consultants in [INAUDIBLE].

So during the tendering stage, the consultants come in. They create a [INAUDIBLE] with the BEP being a firm BEP now. That is when we go and bring in the contractors, even the one who is involved in design and build contract. And this ends the stage of mobilization where all these stakeholders are mobilized.

Now that being said, we also had to solve a big industry problem of design deliverables and battery limits and design deliverables and bringing in transparency. So we had to develop a scope matrix which worked for the Indian context. What we did, our scope matrix is a small snapshot of our scope matrix. It has normal columns like every other scope matrix has milestones, scope of service, and deliverables.

This is a beautiful thing about standards. You put in standards, you don't have to-- Once you put ISO 19650, and it is done. You don't have to get into every specifics. And this is something which is great about standards.

And we had stakeholder names, even the ones who are making shop drawings. So we actually added them into the scope matrix, so it is end to end. We ditched other classic RACF matrix because we realized that it didn't work when there is a unified scope, and it didn't work in the Indian context.

And we modified and adopted something which is called the PSRAX matrix. This worked for the Indian context. To give you an example why RACF matrix doesn't work for Indian context, is because when you have many people listed as responsible, who is actually accountable to finish the activity? And that becomes a big challenge, and it falls between the cracks. And, you have people escalating everything.

This worked for us. When you say primary responsibility, it trumps everything else. And that is what is sent out. And because of this, what happened is we floated one RFP to all the consultants, and we only changed the name of the package and stuff like that. It saved a ton of time. And you will not believe it. We could get all the consultants at once.

So this is where things get really serious. Information production is a crucial step. Other than looking at common data environment, which is a very common thing to do to look at how you're going to do information production, there are other things that you have to worry about. You have to worry about risk management.

In this case, we did it the old-fashioned way. We took a risk and placed it on a matrix of impact and probability and with an intent to mitigate it or [INAUDIBLE] it, very simple. Training plan to ensure upskilling of your workforce and to ensure that the learning and the gaps are done sustainability because sustainability was a big challenge. So we had to solve this problem also.

And so what I'm trying to say is, it's not only the common data environment. You have to be worried about the other three steps, as well. So let me dive into the common data environment and then we'll come back and look at risk and stuff like that.

So let's look at how we have structured the workflow so that something like this never happens to us. Yes, it does happen to us, but it doesn't happen because of data retrieval problems. So previously, [INAUDIBLE] rather large folder structure, and because there was lack of autoversioning, we couldn't make a naming convention, which actually worked.

And because we had to archive documents into specific folders, it had too many written down rules, like SOP. It ultimately failed because it was person driven and how much that person knows. So this was a big problem. And if you look at those black part, that is where I've written three names that three different stakeholders have written.

So we had a rule that you have to write these dates backwards and write the name. All three are right, but none of them are retrievable. So this was a big problem that we had to solve. Also, when we did the initial survey, asking our project managers and people at site, what do you need, what is that you need, what can solve your data retrieval problem, they all said one thing. They wanted one folder for all. They didn't want a folder inside a folder inside a folder. They wanted one folder where they can find it. So this was a major imperative for us. We had to solve this.

So we developed a naming convention by which the naming convention exactly says what the file is about. You actually know the name before you go out and search it. This is an imperative, and this we achieved. We enforce the naming convention on the folders thanks to Autodesk Construction Cloud again. And the one folder for all was a reality.

Today, we basically have three folders work in progress, shared, and published. And we have three folders inside. It is not actually one folder for all, but it is superbly intuitive. So you don't have to go looking for documents. You just have to go into that one folder and find the document.

So this is a great thing that we achieved. We achieved one folder for all. So I also added this slide just to show you how we imagined our naming convention to be. We never imagined it to be a nested column. We imagined it to be like a periodic table so that you're like a child's play. You turn things and create names and lists, and you can add things, subtract things.

So this imagination work, I mean, we developed a naming convention, which unfortunately, we have not changed. And so showing you how the folder structure works. So as I said, there are three basic folders in our platform that's work in progress, shared, and published.

And inside of work in progress is split as stakeholders as 000, which is ITC and 001 and other [INAUDIBLE]. Work in progress and shared folders are the same. They are split up as stakeholders. The only difference is shared folder has the naming convention. So when you move something from work in progress to shared, you have to conform to the naming convention.

Published folder, only review approved or approved with comments documents get into published. This is where the magic happens. The published folder just gets converted into design stages, and inside that design stages, we have three folders, which is models, drawings, and others. Now if you get it, called a folder, also the last level is this. That's it. That makes it intuitive.

We have our latest aggregated model where our final model is kept and every Tuesday it is updated. And you look at the amount of issues which are there. This is where people review their models. And all the models which are related to that are seen on that side. Yeah, and this is a place to elaborate.

And then you have a reference folder for ISO 19650, where you shared resources for codes and templates, et cetera. You have two folders for submittals and RFIs, and one folder for schedule. And that's it. 14 folders, everything is a [? repeat ?] [INAUDIBLE] and very intuitive. We don't have any written down rules for this folders by the way.

And when we look at our folder structure, only three folders we have naming convention info. Rest of the folders are non-regimental. We have left it open. So this is again, going by our principle that [? will not ?] keep the regimental processes at check to keep things which are kind of controlled at check so that people have leg room to move around.

Yes, we had to do this. We had to ditch emails. And this is very important for us because we believe that emails are a killer of effective collaboration. Timely tracking of accountability is near to impossible with emails.

So what we did is we used issues. We don't use emails. The simple rule is that if your email has a attachment, don't send it as an email, send it as an issue. So you look at the amount of issues that are there, as I said on our model, and all these things are communications which are going. Issues are handed to one person. It changes hands, it goes through a lot of things. And finally, it gets solved unlike an email. And our meetings are becoming more effective nowadays. We are not spending time discovering issues. We are diving straight into solving them.

And when it came to photos, we said, no, we will not regiment the [INAUDIBLE] photos. We'll keep it as open as possible. You can name it anything that you want. Think of it as Facebook. Name whatever tag that you want.

And I'll show you what happened. I mean, a simple generic word like a raft in civil engineering, you just type that. And you would get all the photographs that are related to that. Now this is already very intuitive. And when you click on a photograph, you see how many tags are there. At this level, a small spelling mistake doesn't even matter. So this is how we have-- when I said those 45,000 photographs which we have done is traceable, this is why it is traceable because it is not [? original. ?]

So let's face it. Paperbound drawings, which are issued to site, have an expiry date and also accessibility is limited. So how do you make a drawing timeless? Make it digital. So previously, in phase I, we had physically signed drawings with consultants who are all across India. And the average time that we took was 45 days to finish a drawing from review to sending it to site.

So this is how our drawing looked. You see there is a seal for, good for construction, when it was received. And there is one section where somebody has checked the reviews. It superseded drawing obviously, and then people have signed and stuff. So all these processes, 45 days.

Today, it's come down to 14 days. How? We've used a good old review process for this. So the GFC comes in as a review, goes through all the consultants who write, it is approved then it finally comes to the project manager. The project manager, he decides to approve the drawing.

First, he has to change status. ISO 9650, goes and changes the status as A3. And that is A3 is approved without comments or construction stage. So it is absolutely approved. Very important that the drawing is approved fully for it to get into GFC state. And so approved it comments also gets into the published state. Approved, also gets into the published folder. But approval comments doesn't get into your sheets.

And then you go ahead and publish the GFC. So all the drawings that you approved, now is in the published folder, and you are sending it. The name is quite intuitive, the stakeholder, DFC, and the number, and the date that you are issuing it and save.

This is a very important part. The last buckets of our naming convention matches the drawing. So what happens is it becomes very intuitive. People are able to look at it outside, inside the drawing, and they're able to make [INAUDIBLE]. Also, the [? SR ?] takes care of the thing that it is a structural drawing. So it is freed of tags for us too. And we use tags for revisions, so you don't have to get into the drawing to look at what revision it is. And so this made it very easy for people. So this is the drawings, and you could see all the tags has the revisions of the drawing.

Also, how do you authorize this? So we used the classic markup tool to mark up and sign [? DLCs ?] and publish it. That's it. The entire document is out, and it's accessible to everybody. Yeah.

So how do we bring the training part? How do we ensure that our entire workforce gets trained? There are some things that we did the old-fashioned way also for governance but paperless, though. It was not with paper. It was paperless, but we did it the old-fashioned way.

So when it came to training, we said that the 10 hours training is mandatory. Without that, we will not give you licenses. So this is the current statistics. 150 people certified and 237 have active licenses.

Now, this difference is because India is a place where it's not generally people don't speak English. So most of the videos are in English. So we had to hand train a few people who don't understand English, so we never mark them as certified because they don't have a certificate. But they know how to use the plan.

So the best part is, out of this 237, the 150 people who are certified who went through this 10-hours training, continued the journey of learning. And that is a great thing that happened to us. We never expected this to happen.

And also, when it comes to learning, I mean, how do you sustainably capture learning? Now, when we were implementing eh [INAUDIBLE] we were not only learning, we were making mistakes, and we were correcting mistakes. So this is a very important thing for us because we had to come back and correct mistakes also.

So what we decided is how can learning and the system of correcting errors be amalgamated so that they become one process? We used something like a memo, which is a good old-fashioned governance way, where the project manager sends out a memo saying that he is intending to change a certain process that might be a fallout of a learning or a mistake that you've made in the past.

And then these memos become an annexure to your EIR. And after a quarter, they're incorporated into the [INAUDIBLE]. This worked beautifully for us that every quarter, our document is completely updated and is ready.

So when our audit happened, the auditor actually told us that this is one of the best ways that we've seen people capture learning because it is not like an Excel sheet where you maintain it like a risk register and never go back and look at it. So this is a great thing that happened. So in India, [? claims ?] are an inevitability. So it is very important that our minutes are signed. And that is something that we had to weave in into our processes.

We have agenda and minutes. When the meeting minutes only becomes minutes when somebody signs the document. So this is where people sign. And once it is submitted back to us, we put it as reference, and we just change the agenda into minutes. And this is a very simple workaround that we have, inevitability. So we've ensured that this is moving.

Yeah so when I close this section, there are a few key insights that I want to leave you with. Following globally accepted standards strengthens credibility, very clear on that. Should use standards as a guiding light. Avoid emails for collaboration is a great place to start.

Again, keep regimental processes under check. This is the only way you can drive success when it comes to digital transformation. And you might have certain processes in your company which you want to implement because you cannot change it, maybe your region or your country. And you should understand that the digital tools are constantly evolving. They're constantly changing. So it is very important to have process work around to deliver success and rather than complaining about that 20% which didn't work.

Yeah, so developing a BIM-first project is still a pain, irrespective of the region. Anybody, can be anybody from any region in this world, for them, developing a BIM-first project is a pain. So how do you go about doing it?

There are two obstacles to BIM that we believe is a human factor and the others. The human factor can be solved by upskilling and increasing awareness. But the others, that is data management, standards, and interoperability, and cost needs a step-by-step approach and a common data environment for information management becomes very important in this.

Once you implement a common data environment, you basically solve the data retrieval and the collaboration issue and it becomes a single source of truth. Because when you bring in your quality checklist, you have your tagging that helps you with accountability. Then you bring in your design management, which takes care of your BIM on cloud and real-time clash resolutions. This is when you have [INAUDIBLE].

And following standards like ISO 19650 ensures that your processes-- and so that you are achieving this properly. And then you have material specification for 3D, you have 4D for time, then you have 5D.

Without following these steps, we don't believe that you can strike success. There is nobody who went from collaborating outside a common data environment with 3D and just made a 5D simulation. It's quite difficult.

[? We'll ?] look at our BIM data. This is developed by consultants. And it is the ready stage, which is two, three months back that we had this model. I picked it up from there. We are proud to say we don't have anything that is not model. We have even incorporated the [INAUDIBLE].

So now there is scope check, and the tender check happens seamlessly. We have modeled everything from rainwater harvesting to a [INAUDIBLE] strip. We have not followed [? LODs, ?] like 300 or 400. We followed something like LOI, where we said the consultant will model as per his bill of quantity.

So if he this bill of quantity says piping isn't running, [INAUDIBLE] he will model and running meter. And so that is something that we did. And this is the detail that we got. We didn't even have to get into [INAUDIBLE].

And you look at this. We have also modeled things like [INAUDIBLE] and the chambers. So when I look at the tear list, I feel so proud. I mean, we've even modeled the walkways. And there is nothing that we have not modeled.

And the lightning arrester strips, it's another level today. And you look at this plant room. It's already skid mounted. So [INAUDIBLE] has become a possibility for us today. We have shifted 80% of our work to factories now. This is something which is vital for us.

So because of effective collaboration thanks to ACC, because we have a very evolved model, today, virtual construction is a possibility for me. Before I dive deep into this, I want to talk to you about something.

When we started, the first activity that we had for the building was excavation. So the excavation contractor, very, very low key contractor, came in. And we wanted to run virtual construction, the excavation virtual construction. So before they came in, we had created a model of the construction, which was a negative model where we had to pull out the model. It was not something that you're adding or removing something.

And then we decided that we will excavate from the site, and we'll come to the center and finish the excavation. So we had done a virtual construction like that. And when [? ITC ?] met the excavation contractor for the first time, we said, hey, we've done the virtual construction. Why don't we look at it and say, OK, and we'll go ahead?

And the excavation contractor looked at it and said, why will I do something like this? I will excavate from the center because I need to do building faster. I will never excavate from the side because it will take a lot of time for me.

And we realized what a blunder that we have done, and we quickly changed it. We ran it by him, and after he looked at that simulation, he hardly changed. He started two months late. He finished it on time. So let's look at that.

Usually, project management teams compare three schedules baseline, estimated time of completion which is your plan, and your actual. You can look at it visually. Coupled with the time-lapse camera, it gives you so much information. You are able to change things, correct mistakes, learn from these things.

Look at this. I mean, we could even avoid safety issues of not excavating two meters deeper next to each other. So this is the structure. The red part is the reinforcement that is happening, and the green part is concrete getting done, once it becomes gray, it means that the work is completed.

And you could look at it. It is visual. Look at how the core is coming up. And you already see that. Visually you see that there is already a delay, and the core had to come much higher, and it is somewhere below. And this is what visual construction does to you. Our management meetings get over in 10 minutes. We go and tell them that this is what we were planning to do, and this is what we are done. And by the way, this is our actual plan.

And this visual thing increases predictability. The contractor is not able to come back and tell you that I will finish it. He has to prove it. It has to be visual. So this kind of adds a lot of predictability. You're able to take course-corrective actions.

So the digital pentagon and the digital implement for the digital implementation team in CPO has come a long way today. Today, we are looking at digitizing the procurement and project management, and we are trying to bring classification system into it.

And we are also looking at writing tech specs for India. Again, that is also a daunting task. We need to take that up. And we are also planning to use classifications for cost management because cost to complete is a very important thing for us. And we need that to take budgetary decisions. So this is the next step for us.

The dream of CPO is to create enough [? actual ?] data so that you can parameterize design and to bring down the design time, so to say. And then you are able to run the model directly to your RFP, or you have spend analytics, you have cost management, and you have cost to complete. You are able to take budgetary decisions fast. And you are taking decisions so fast that predictability increases for the entire project. Once this is done, we have to just wait for AI to take over. That's it. And this is what we are planning to do in the coming days.

Before I move ahead with the rest of my presentation, I want to thank the entire team that made all this possible. Without them I wouldn't be standing here talking about the digital revolution that is brewing here in India. So MacLeamy curve left us here, a few years back. And today, our endeavor is to shift the effort forward, to bring the effort down, and to make sure that the lines between the design stages become blurry. And we are able to transition from one to another seamlessly. And this is what we are-- our constant endeavors.

So now taking you back to what happened in the initial presentation when I spoke to you about competitive advantage, I spoke to you about how competitive advantage would drive ROI. Let's look at the competitive advantage.

For our external business where we are doing work for people outside the ITC, this is the lead generation. These are the active leads which are there over the years. You see the initial years, not good. Because we were competing in the same area. And we are competing in the [? EPCF ?] space. We were not competing in the integrated digital delivery space.

So the day we started, 2023, '22, '23, we started talking about BIM and collaboration on the cloud in CPO. That is when our active leads went up. When we finally did, virtual benchmarking, just doubled. This is the amount of active leads we have today. And you look at the transition. Because today, integrated digital delivery has become a competitive advantage.

So the elephant in the room, the ROI, in this project, ITC Green Center, we have already saved 0.9% of the project budget because of digitalization. And in that 0.9%, we will only spend 40% for digitization. And this is the breakup, 67% for building information, modeling, 24% for cloud, and 5% for coding. So ROI is [? proven. ?]

The next thing is some things that we did not expect will happen. Like say, for example, because the teams became very efficient, they started concentrating on sustainability. Today, you will not believe it. We don't send any construction and demolition waste outside the construction site. We reuse it outside. They found a way to crush it and use it as a filling in the foundations.

We have already stopped 337 cubic meters, which is 16 metric ton of carbon equivalent from going out of this. Because we have such an evolved model today, contractors are asking us to ditch three miserable contracts. They're telling us, why can't it be lump sum [INAUDIBLE] risks? So this is a beautiful thing that happened.

Also, for this project, probably it is the first time in India that somebody is doing a full-scale life-cycle analysis for a project. And because we have such an evolved model, we are able to churn out scenarios. So these are some things that happened to us.

And before I end my presentation, I want to leave you with a question. With the effect of digital strategy, is a fool with a tool, still a fool? Thank you.