10 November 2019 - In a business and economic climate where embracing change is necessary to survive, having suffered from many years of poor productivity versus other industries, it is widely accepted that the construction sector has been slow to respond and adapt. McKinsey’s latest report – Imagining Construction’s Digital Future – supports the notion that construction’s lack of progress in adoption of digital technology and information sharing has meant owners and contractors have been exposed to increased risk, principally as a result of working from different versions of the ‘same’ information.

As part of their efforts to maintain a competitive edge, and in response to demands from their clients, many consulting firms are making technological improvement a top priority. With more than 55,000 and 10,000 employees around the world, respectively, Wood Plc and GHD are just two of many organizations going digital to change their project delivery processes and improve business outcomes. Transforming work-sharing processes for handling project information across their respective organizations, through the application of consistent and repeatable digital workflows, each has increased productivity, saving thousands of labor hours on their projects around the globe.

A Bentley user for more than a decade, GHD needed a global information management system that could meet its goal of implementing newly released ISO standards. Starting with a discipline-based scope definition and automated project initiation objectives and building on its existing investments in building information modeling (BIM) processes, GHD built a new framework to accommodate the ISO 19650-2 BIM standard. GH created a project-centric connected data environment with ProjectWise at its core, to support projects of all scale and complexity.

With the adoption of a common set of standards and workflows, and access to information it can trust, GHD’s multidiscipline teams are able to move from one project to another, anywhere in the world, quickly and easily. Moreover, by removing the potential confusion created when working on several projects with only small differences, team members can avoid mistakes, wasted time and effort, as well as avoid the increased costs associated with learning multiple and unique project environments. Previously, when GHD staff joined a project, a considerable amount of their time would be spent understanding the variations in project structure. Currently, GHD has 1,800 people working on an average of 10 projects a year using a common set of standards, saving the organization an estimated 18,000 hours annually.

“Delivering consistent high-quality project outcomes is crucial to business success,” said David Nicholson, collaborations technologies manager at GHD. “Achieving this across the globe required consistent and repeatable systems to be implemented. The power of ProjectWise is globally recognized as the benchmark for management of AEC-based project content. GHD’s vision was to extend that potential into a globally adopted context to support a significantly wider range of project types and sizes. Our vision continues to extend the intended limits of the available tools and having worked with Bentley for more than a decade, we’re delighted that neither of us has stopped innovating.”

Currently working on many major capital projects for oil and gas owner-operators in the Middle East, Wood Plc, identified that the adoption of a consistent global approach to information management was key to delivering sustained growth in the sector. Implementing ProjectWise enabled Wood to create a single source of truth for project information, and alongside standardized project procedures and governance plans, deliver the consistency it needed. Moreover, as different teams joined the group through mergers or acquisitions, the ability to have each one follow a similar set of standards and workflows, enabled the organization to guarantee the same levels of consistency across projects and execution centres.

As a global provider of project, engineering, and technical services, Wood’s approach enables parallel working in a follow-the-sun manner, guaranteeing critical activities and milestones within the schedule are met without impacting consistency and the quality of delivery to its clients. Through its use of ProjectWise, with management of templates, SEED files, metadata, workflows, and access control, Wood has realized significant savings. With upwards of 20,000 drawings being developed on each of its projects, Wood is utilizing ProjectWise’s tag sets and title block integration to automatically populate these at the point of creation, saving an estimated 3,600 labor hours as a result.

“Recreating winning habits and best practice consistently anywhere in the world enables us to improve outcomes for our clients and for Wood,” said Andy Barr, head of engineering, capital projects at Wood. “The use of ProjectWise has ensured a consistent delivery across many projects operating across several work share locations. The rigor and discipline built into the system ensures deliverable quantity is improved and reliable across all office locations. This, coupled with the saving in man-hours and infrastructure costs, has proved to be an excellent development for our project delivery.”