On the upcoming design of his firm’s ERP platform, he says, “What I am personally quite excited about is, beyond looking at the enterprise in terms of resource, time, costs, manpower and larger connectivity with our global offices, we brought in a new, special skill component.”
The new skill component is expected to provide DPA with a better overview of and insight into how skillsets are distributed across offices and teams. This way, the right training and manpower planning can be made to achieve higher productivity within the company and across employees to mitigate redundancy and improve succession planning
Secondly, the firm fully embraced the power of digital applications with the launch of proptech marketplace Spaceworx in August last year.
“We recognised the potential of technology to transform our practice early on and since then have been exploring how to capitalise on digitalisation to grow our business,” says Mr Seah.
The new business line came about with tech partner Eutech Cybernetic, a company that ESG introduced to DPA in 2015.
“Spaceworx allows different stakeholders to come together to plug and play different digital twin components,” explains Mr Seah.
This way, businesses or building owners can purchase pre-built solutions that allow them to monitor various aspects of building performance – all on a single digital platform.
The data collected will, in turn, help building owners optimise performance, from environmental sustainability to occupant experience. This business-to-business platform currently targets Singapore and Malaysia.
In collaborating with Eutech, DPA itself will also be able to incorporate smart solutions in its building designs, extending the services it can offer.
Finally, DPA is boosting its tech capabilities to uplift its work in sustainability. The firm’s pursuit of decarbonisation and circularity will get a boost with what Mr Seah says is “quite a fair bit of digital tools and platforms”.
Green, Well, Tech
The tri-factor of “green, well and tech (G-W-T)” is what DPA is “quite obsessed” with, says Mr Seah. To help it better synergise the many aspects of sustainability, the organisation has created a matrix – what it calls “attributes of purposeful design”– that broadly covers economics, environment and people.