Project overview
Sweco, one of Europe’s leading architecture and engineering consultancies, carries out multidiscipline projects in 70 countries annually throughout the world. In its pursuit of shaping tomorrow’s sustainable cities and societies, the company believes that infrastructure is an essential part of this revolution and will be the foundation for the coming years. To achieve these advancements in infrastructure, the company made it its goal to implement a connected, digitalised approach across its global projects. It aimed to implement a road map to enforce consistent standards and workflows, shift to data-driven management processes, and drive proactive project management using real-time, automated insights.
Challenge
Without embracing a connected, digitalised approach to project information management, collaboration and decision-making, the company would be limited in delivering consistent, high quality project outcomes.
For example, Sweco recognised that traditional data management methods were often time-consuming, labour intensive and error prone. Project data under these methods was unstructured and tedious to manage because the data was housed in several locations including servers, local hard drives and ad hoc file sharing, resulting in dispersed and duplicated information across several locations. As it is globally distributed, multidisciplin teams worked with large volumes of data from multiple sources and in a variety of formats. The company needed a solution that would encourage collaboration rather than reduce the effectiveness of its teams working together.
The company was also aware that it had to push the boundaries of how its global projects and teams were connected to information and to one another. Not only did it need to reliably and quickly work with up-to-date project information across disciplines and worksites, but it also needed to standardise and effectively manage the information in a centralised, up-to-date data model. The centralised data model would help to gain efficiencies and mitigate risk by ensuring its projects adhered to BIM standards and best practice workflows. It could also give project managers access to automated project insights to identify and circumvent potential bottlenecks and issues ahead of time.
Sweco knew that it was a challenge to implement this connected, digitalised approach across its projects globally, but without it, the company risked letting these limitations hold it back from being an industry leader in advancing infrastructure.
Breakthrough
Sweco realised that a connected approach would provide immediate benefits. Multidiscipline teams could collaborate faster and more easily, as well as leverage industry-proven BIM workflows in a live, common data environment. They would be able to integrate multiple sources of data to create intelligent digital twin models to connect data and apply information to actionable project insights.
As the company explored potential solutions, it recognised that ProjectWise could help to successfully enable its connected approach across its global projects. ProjectWise enabled it to create a digital twin, which served as a single source of information for any given project and enabled it to collect, manage and disseminate all relevant project documents for multidiscipline teams in managed processes. ProjectWise empowered it to leverage the insights from data as well via automated dashboards.
“Embracing Bentley’s managed service with our ISO 19650 data model is allowing us to fast-track our aspiration to deliver digital twin solutions for our partners and clients,” said Rupinder Wilkhu, head of digital delivery and BIM, Sweco, UK.
Since deploying ProjectWise in October 2019, Sweco has used it as the single source of information for 16 major projects across 14 organisations globally. In particular, Sweco UK is delivering 10 projects within its data model, with an estimated cost of over GBP 750 million from 16 offices and with over 300 project members, allowing clients, designers, contractors and stakeholders across England to work together in one large collaborative team.
Sweco was able to successfully deploy ISO 19650-compliant ProjectWise data models within four weeks from the data source made available by Bentley – a process that has previously required in-house customisation and taken up to six months.
By embracing a live decision-making process to digitally approve design deliverables, Sweco has seen 10 per cent efficiency savings on project programmes. Improved information management has enabled the company to leverage clash avoidance processes to gain up to 30 per cent more efficiency in interdisciplinary review processes, as well as ensure all project information created and managed within folders aligned with the client’s asset-data requirements, to gain further efficiencies and success in meeting client expectations by ensuring a seamless digital handover at each completion stage.
Additionally, the ability to access near-real-time, automated project insights has allowed it to predict early warning signs and mitigate potential issues to the project delivery. Without needing to manually extract and analyse performance data, Sweco project leaders were able to make more proactive decisions, which was critical in delivering projects faster and with less risk.
Through these changes, Sweco has seen significant gains in overall productivity, enabling its teams to deliver projects faster and meet deadlines more easily. They have also seen significant reductions in risk, mitigating design errors, rework and schedule risks across their projects. These benefits have translated into cost savings as well, in addition to improved quality of project delivery.
Sweco is currently supporting more than 3,500 internal users and 500 external users across 400 projects globally, embracing a cultural change that is allowing them to optimise project outcomes across the enterprise.
A representation of Sweco’s asset-centric data model, Sweco leveraged its ProjectWise data model to drive “live” decision-making processes.