CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
25 October 2012
Implementation Investments
AECOM Saves $850,000 Using ProjectWise for Work Sharing and Engineering Content Management
Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced that AECOM Technology Corporation, a global provider of professional technical and management support services for government and commercial clients, has selected Bentley’s ProjectWise for the cloud-based engineering content management of its Texas State Highway (SH) 161 Phase 4 project. The ProjectWise system of collaboration servers and services provides industry-proven work sharing, content reuse, and dynamic review capabilities that are essential to leveraging information modeling through integrated projects for high-performing, intelligent infrastructure. The $416 million design/build project completes a 6.5-mile link in the loop around Dallas-Fort Worth, managed by the North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA). AECOM was challenged to complete the major design elements within 15 months. With the project office in Grand Prairie, Texas, and team members distributed across 22 locations in seven U.S. states, AECOM implemented ProjectWise Online to provide project team members, regardless of their location, with a single, secure environment to create high-quality design documents. ProjectWise enabled AECOM to increase quality, create documents that were 95 percent compliant with its client’s CAD standards, and reduce risk, saving NTTA $850,000 in costs associated with information, workspaces, and standards management as well as quality-control review.
AECOM Chief Technology Officer Jim Walsh said, “The tremendous success of this project could not have been accomplished without the use of ProjectWise. This secure work-sharing environment reduces our business risk by ensuring the right people have access to the right information at the right time. This means decisions aren’t being made based on the wrong data, resulting in fewer change orders and their associated costs in time and money.”
To deliver the SH 161 Phase 4 project on time, AECOM created a team of 12 sub-consultants and 300 colleagues located throughout the United States. Fostering communication and collaborative workflows was the key to successful project completion, but AECOM also needed an integrated design approach with one quality control system to coordinate so many firms, project team members, and offices. AECOM recommended that a cloud-based solution be implemented and selected ProjectWise Online based on the firm’s broad experience with this software on other projects.
ProjectWise Online provided the team with a reliable and secure environment accessible by team members whether they were working from a home, sub-consultant, or main project office. The ProjectWise servers and services managed by Bentley allowed users to easily find, update, and share engineering content, including CAD documents, project data, PDF files, spreadsheets, and other office documents, without being slowed down by firewall, network, or FTP issues. The core component of the system was the ProjectWise Integration Server, which federates all project data regardless of storage location. Caching servers distributed files locally for fast access.
“The ability of the contractor to request a change in the field, have our project office staff upload comments to ProjectWise, and have anyone, anywhere update information as needed has really helped accomplish quick turnarounds on items for the contractor,” said Brian Dodson, P.E., AECOM’s design manager for the project. “Moreover, the ProjectWise customized workspace eliminated the need for multiple CAD managers to manage separate CAD standards in each office. As a result, staff members from all offices were able to focus on the final deliverable rather than on whether it had the latest CAD standards in place. This capability alone saved the project $250,000.”
In addition, based on the results from the 10 early milestone packages conducted in the project office, AECOM found that the decision to employ ProjectWise and eliminate travel for design review meetings saved the project approximately $600,000. The techniques implemented on this project will allow this crucial piece of infrastructure to be ready for the Dallas-Fort Worth area on time.
“As a longtime user of ProjectWise on many of its projects, AECOM has benefited from the advantages this system provides in work sharing, content reuse, and dynamic review in a secure, trusted environment,” said Huw Roberts, Bentley vice president, core marketing. “But for this project, the firm needed to reduce costs and implementation time, so we were glad to offer this as an online service, eliminating the administrative costs of hosting and managing files.”
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