Project Overview
Sweco, one of Europe’s leading architecture and engineering consultancies, carries out multidiscipline projects in 70 countries annually throughout the world. In their pursuit of shaping tomorrow’s sustainable cities and societies, they believe that infrastructure is an essential part of this revolution and will be the foundation for the coming years. To achieve these advancements in infrastructure, they made it their goal to implement a connected, digitalized approach across their global projects. They aimed to implement a roadmap 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, digitalized approach to project information management, collaboration, and decision-making Sweco knew that they would be limited in delivering consistent, high-quality project outcomes.
For example, Sweco recognized that traditional data management methods were often time-consuming, labor 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 their globally distributed, multidiscipline teams worked with large volumes of data from multiple sources and in a variety of formats, they needed a solution that would encourage collaboration rather than reduce the effectiveness of their teams working together.
Sweco also knew that they had to push the boundaries of how their global projects and teams were connected to information and to one another. Not only did they need to reliably and quickly work with up-to-date project information across disciplines and worksites, they also needed to standardize and effectively manage their information in a centralized, up-to-date data model. The centralized data model would help them gain efficiencies and mitigate risk by ensuring their projects adhered to BIM standards and best-practice workflows. They could also give their 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, digitalized approach across their projects globally, but without it, they risked letting these limitations hold them back from being an industry leader in advancing infrastructure.
Breakthrough
Sweco realized that a connected approach would provide immediate benefits. Multidiscipline teams could collaborate faster and easier, 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 Sweco explored potential solutions, they recognized that ProjectWise could help them successfully enable their connected approach across their global projects. ProjectWise enabled them to create a digital twin, which served as a single source of information for any given project and enabled them to collect, manage, and disseminate all relevant project documents for multidiscipline teams in managed processes. ProjectWise empowered them to leverage the insights from this 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 at Sweco, UK.
Since deploying ProjectWise in October 2019, Sweco has used it as the single source of information for 16 major projects across 14 organizations globally. In particular, Sweco UK is delivering 10 projects within their 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.
Outcome
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 customization and taken up to six months.
By embracing a live decision-making process to digitally approve design deliverables, Sweco has seen 10% efficiency savings on project programs. Improved information management has enabled them to leverage clash avoidance processes to gain up to 30% 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 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 them to predict early warning signs and mitigate potential issues to the project delivery. Without needing to manually extract and analyze 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 their teams to deliver projects faster and meet deadlines easier. They have also seen significant reductions in risk, mitigating design errors, rework, and schedule risks across their projects. These benefits have translated to 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 optimize project outcomes across their enterprise.
