Beca reduces project time by 33% with BIM 360 Design

Overview

Beca has identified Autodesk as one of five key information and communication technology (ICT) supply chain partners, as well as a primary software provider. Beca is very interested in emerging technologies and engaging with Autodesk to inform its investments and thinking.

Customer Background and Goals

Headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, Beca is an employee-owned professional services firm offering engineering and related consultancy services. With more than 3,000 professionals in 19 offices across the Asia-Pacific region, Beca serves multiple markets, including Infrastructure, Industrial, Buildings, Power, Defense, and Advisory.

Because Beca utilizes resources in Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia to effectively deliver projects, the company’s Customer Success Plan (CSP) identified improving the organization’s intercontinental collaboration as one of its four key goals.

Success Story

Challenge: In the spring of 2016, Beca took on an $80 million food factory expansion project in Sydney, Australia, for which they would need to utilize Revit software. Company management knew that the architectural design and engineering represented at least 12 weeks of work, but Beca only had eight weeks to complete the project.

With a very tight timeline to get its design documentation out, Beca would have to engage external offices. In addition to its large workforce across the Asia-Pacific locations, Beca also collaborates with documentation firms in Indonesia and the Philippines. While this brings cost efficiencies to large design projects, working with these firms also presents drawbacks—such as the time wasted uploading and downloading shared models, and the risk of extensive rework. And while Beca has experience in implementing different collaboration solutions with various capabilities, those were not appropriate for this particular project.

Solution: With the goal of achieving better collaboration in mind, Autodesk worked with the customer to understand the regional teams’ requirements. Beca was investing in collaboration solutions like Panzurra (which required some hardware set-up), but the Autodesk team positioned Autodesk® BIM 360® Design (formerly "Collaboration for Revit") as an alternative—and undertook a small BIM 360 Design trial with the Technical Director for BIM.

Following the successful trial, the Beca team undertook a small pilot project with support from the Autodesk team. With growing confidence in using the BIM 360 Design solution, the Beca team began to apply the technology on other upcoming projects—including the eight-week-long, $80M industrial project.

“The benefits are almost immeasurable. The cost of deployment was only a few hundred dollars for the duration of the job, and we achieved an ROI very quickly through the reductions in rework alone. It was an incredibly cost-effective solution.”
Craig Lamont, Business Director, ANZPac Markets, Beca

Success: By implementing BIM 360 Design, Beca was able to reduce the project’s duration by a third—and, ultimately, to meet the food factory project’s challenging design deadline by taking full advantage of the time zone span between New Zealand and Indonesia. Effectively stretching the workday to 15 hours, Beca’s NZ team would begin work in the morning; the Australia team would get going two hours later; and the Indonesia and Manila teams would come on board before the other offices went home for the day. As a result, the team “knew exactly what we wanted them to work on and what the design deliverables were for the day,” reported Craig Lamont.

“It saved massive amounts of time and effort. We no longer needed to upload and download the model, and our people in overlapping time zones could work on the project simultaneously.”
Brett Naylor, Group Digital Delivery Manager, Beca

Not only did BIM 360 Design maximize the multi-region team’s traditional “workday,” it enhanced communication between team-members in different offices. Workers on the project spoke three different primary languages, but the Revit solution helped to minimize confusion between them. According to Lamont, having “everyone see the same thing in Revit at the same time helped overcome the language barrier.” This project is a fantastic demonstration of using BIM 360 Design and cloud technology to not only overcome geographic, language, and cultural barriers, but to resolve the perceived challenges around IT infrastructure.

Want to learn more? Read more on this story from the Revit blog.