Structured Data Creates Business Value: How Soilbuild Turned Compliance Data Into a Strategic Advantage with SGBuildex

Gerald Ho, Head of Digitalisation and Project Director at Soilbuild Construction Group, on why structured data is becoming a business decision, not just a compliance one.

Soilbuild piloted SGBuildex alongside Novade, its digital delivery platform, at the Tampines North Drive 4 project, cutting submission time for steel element and rebar test submissions by up to 80%. Ho explains why structured data is becoming less about compliance, and more about where the real business value lies.

▶ Watch the full video interview below

Key Takeaways

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The Weight of Reporting, Not Engineering

For Gerald Ho, Head of Digitalisation and Project Director at Soilbuild Construction Group, the problem was never a shortage of data. It was how much time his teams spent moving it around.

Before SGBuildex, regulatory and operational processes carried a heavy administrative load. Teams dealt with duplicate data entry, reformatting the same information for different stakeholders, manual consolidation of reports, and the constant effort of meeting varying compliance requirements.

“We were not lacking data, we were spending too much time moving and reformatting it,” Ho says.

The frustrations stacked up: excessive non-value-added administrative work, no single source of truth, difficulty tracking accurate and up to date information, fragmented communication, and a higher risk of manual error. The cost showed up in Soilbuild’s most skilled people.

“Highly trained engineers were spending disproportionate time on reporting instead of engineering,” he adds.

For a main contractor, that cost rarely shows up on its own line. It sits inside schedule buffers, disputed claims, and the margin quietly eaten by rework, invisible to leadership until someone goes looking for it.

Connect Once, Connect All in Practice

The shift, Ho says, has been in how structured and streamlined the workflow has become. Data captured on site through Novade, Soilbuild’s digital delivery platform, now aligns directly with regulatory requirements, removing the need to reformat it for submission.

In practice, that means data is captured once at source, then reused across internal workflows, consultants and authorities, with no duplication required.

“It shifts the effort from repeated reporting to getting the data right at source,” Ho explains.

Soilbuild has moved from manual submissions to automated data flows, from documents to structured data, and from reactive clarification to proactive compliance, a shift reflected in faster submission timelines, reduced administrative workload and improved coordination through real time visibility.

One API connection lets Soilbuild’s structured data reach BCA, HDB and other stakeholders directly, without separate pipelines to each.

A Neutral Platform Built on Trust

That structure only matters if the parties on the other end can trust it. Ho points to SGBuildex’s role as a neutral platform as central to why the model works.

Unstructured data, he says, carries real risk: lost time, a higher chance of disputes, poorer decisions, and manpower costs that rarely show up on a balance sheet until someone looks for them. Siloed systems only make the fragmentation worse.

“We don’t need more platforms. We need platforms that can connect,” Ho says.

SGBuildex acts as a data exchange layer, letting systems across the construction ecosystem interoperate rather than compete for the same workflow. That neutrality is what makes shared data trustworthy in the first place.

“When data is shared and trusted, disputes reduce significantly,” he says.

The Productivity Dividend: Real Time Saved, Real Decisions Improved

The numbers bear this out. Comparing a traditional, manual submission against the same process run through Novade and SGBuildex, Soilbuild found meaningful time saved at every stage, from data entry through to review and report formatting, which is now automated seamlessly.

Altogether, that is a 60 to 80% reduction in manpower effort per submission, with submission time cut from hours to minutes and far fewer manual errors to chase down.

The pattern held up on site. Soilbuild piloted SGBuildex at its Tampines North Drive 4 project for steel element and rebar test submissions, where manual formatting and consolidation had typically taken 2 to 4 hours. With data captured once in Novade, automatically structured to regulatory requirements, and transmitted directly via SGBuildex, that submission time fell to around 30 minutes.

“Processes that used to delay work by half a day are now completed within the same day,” Ho says.

Individually, the time saved on any one submission is modest. At project scale, across every submission on every project, it adds up to something significant.

Where Structured Data Turns Into Strategic Advantage

For Ho, the real shift is strategic, not administrative. Freed from compliance admin, his teams can put more time into construction, quality and safety, while structured submissions reduce how often sites need manual verification visits.

“We’ve moved from managing documents to managing structured, reusable data,” he says.

That is only the first step. Where information was once scattered across emails, PDFs and messaging platforms, Soilbuild’s teams now work from structured digital forms that are complete by design, removing a source of re-entry error. The value compounds from there.

“We’ve moved from collecting data to actually using it,” Ho says.

Used well, that same structured data starts to answer questions Soilbuild couldn’t ask before: where a project is trending off course, where a bottleneck keeps recurring, which decisions need to be made sooner rather than later. Data becomes information worth acting on, and information, used consistently, becomes the judgement that separates a well-run project from one that is merely compliant.

“It’s not just a compliance tool, it’s a foundation for a more connected and scalable way of working,” Ho says.

What This Means for Singapore’s Main Contractors

Soilbuild’s experience points to a broader shift in how Singapore’s construction sector treats data: not as a submission to get through, but as an asset to be captured once and used everywhere.

A Data Exchange, in Ho’s own words, is a digital utility that allows structured data to be shared across systems and stakeholders.

“Enter data once. Use it everywhere,” he says.

Asked whether he would recommend SGBuildex to others in the industry, Ho’s answer is simple: yes. For Soilbuild, structured data has stopped being a compliance obligation and started being a source of business value.

For other main contractors weighing the same shift, the lesson isn’t that SGBuildex replaces their own systems or expertise. It’s that the admin they’ve learned to live with doesn’t have to be the cost of doing business, and the data they already collect every day can be made to work harder for them.

Curious what structured data could be worth on your own projects? Find out how SGBuildex can turn compliance data into business value for you too: https://www.dextech.ai/our-dexes/sgbuildex/