Sweco saves its clients over 55,000 hours on projects in one year using BIM 360 Design

Above photo credit: Sweco Architects/AIX Arkitekter

Overview

Sweco is Europe’s leading architecture and engineering consultancy firm with more than 16,000 employees that carry out projects in over 70 countries annually throughout the world. Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Sweco’s vision is to be Europe’s most respected company in the fields of consulting engineering, environmental engineering, and architecture. By having a simple, customer-focused way of working, Sweco has developed into a major international player while maintaining a local presence and expertise.

Sweco plans and designs the communities and cities of the future and promises to be its clients most approachable and committed partner with recognized expertise in sustainable buildings, efficient infrastructure, and access to clean water. To deliver its promises to clients, Sweco knows that its digital capabilities need to be market-leading, and that its choice of digital partners are of great importance both internally and for its customers. By working with Autodesk to adopt BIM 360 Design cloud solutions, Sweco saw a 10 percent time savings on all active projects—time that could be used to offer improved and individualized value to Sweco’s clients.

Photo credit: Blok /AIX Arkitekter

Challenge

Work-sharing capabilities are a concern for every project at Sweco. With a decentralized organization and thousands of projects across the globe, Sweco needs the ability to easily collaborate and distribute work both locally and across borders. Sweco also needs the ability to share design intent with clients and stakeholders independent of authoring tools. Complex infrastructure setup and file management can negatively impact project efficiency and client experience. Utilizing new technologies and new ways of working that increase value for Sweco’s customers is critical.

Solution

Now in its second EBA, Sweco has a close partnership with Autodesk that spans several years. Working with Autodesk® Revit® early on helped the company realize and embrace the benefits of cloud collaboration. To continue this forward-thinking evolution, Autodesk and Sweco worked closely together on several engagements to support a successful adoption of BIM 360 Design.

The choice of BIM 360 Design as a cloud collaboration platform is aligned with Sweco’s building blocks for digital transformation, to choose technology that improves Sweco’s efficiencies for collaboration, automation, and analytics. Sweco is working with Autodesk on several lighthouse projects using the “Train the Trainer” approach. In 2019, Sweco and Autodesk established a program to scale BIM 360 in a structured and efficient way across Sweco offices in Europe, helping designers and engineers achieve a fast learning curve and ensuring quick time to value when new teams adopt the new technology.

Photo credit: Credit to Tmrw/Sweco Architects

Success

By using the cloud work-sharing capabilities in BIM 360 Design, Sweco sees a value of more than a 10 percent time savings per project compared to traditional workflows. Calculated based on Sweco’s 200 BIM 360 Design projects that are currently active, this equals a time savings of over 55,000 hours each year. This is time that can be reinvested in quality and value creation on every project, for every client, and for every employee. In addition to time savings with cloud work-sharing, Sweco sees significant value and potential in its design review process by utilizing the functionalities in BIM 360, as well as internal value such as increased knowledge sharing when working on the same platform. By using the same platform time-to-value is increasing and cross-collaboration between teams is easier.

“Previously the communication was made with printed drawings which was time consuming and the quality and review process was hard to follow. With BIM 360 none CAD-users are able to communicate and navigate on their own through sheets and models.”

—Johannes Bergström, Digital Strategist, Sweco Architects