Tools and procedures for remote working: the case of A360

The historic moment we are living through has shown everyone that a company able to adopt remote working must build on some fundamental values: autonomy, linked to the professionalism of its staff, and the flexibility of the whole team.

Remote working cannot be improvised. Covid-19, unfortunately, is making this clear. To be truly smart, we decided to adopt principles and organisational policies that promote what is a genuine cultural change, and which we will certainly keep using in the months to come.

So we decided to publish targeted articles on the tools we are using, to share outside the company what we believe is best practice for anyone in the same situation as us.

Architect Marzia Ricci, BIM coordinator on a major Oil&Gas project in Bahrain, will explain how we at B1P Group manage deliverables in these difficult times caused by Covid-19.

“During these days of lockdown we have managed to meet the organisational challenge and, above all, to manage remote working, overcoming the usual difficulties of deliveries and deadlines.

This emergency has forced us to isolate physically and to lose direct contact with our clients, with a series of inevitable and potential difficulties caused by social distancing.

One of the main problems we encountered with remote working concerned the review of our BIM modelling and site follow-up work. We quickly solved it by using the A360 platform provided by Autodesk, which allowed us to carry on working remotely with our usual quality and timescales, while living and working in an extraordinary situation.

One of the main advantages we have found in using this platform is being able to upload to the cloud our multidisciplinary BIM models built in Revit, the bills of quantities and the 2D drawings, complete with title blocks and notes.

Before the emergency, our submissions for review or for issue were made with PDFs of the drawings, attached and sent by email. Comments and notes were marked up on those PDFs, followed by an exchange of emails that was hard to archive. Once the review stage was over, the marked-up drawings came back so that the requested changes could be made.

Needless to say, this process, still widely used in the industry, wastes a great deal of time for both our clients and us, slows down our workflow, reduces the opportunity for discussion and can lead to the loss of information that is hard to archive.

The A360 platform, on the other hand, gives us a single central workspace where the 2D and 3D files generated from the Autodesk Revit model can be shared, viewed and commented on in real time.

Viewing and sharing BIM 2D and 3D project files in the browser works well, above all thanks to the simple, intuitive interface, even on the move, with no need to download the file or a viewing plug-in.

This way the site coordinator, even when not physically at their workstation, can navigate the model and analyse every part of it.

In the browser you can move easily between the three-dimensional view and saved model views, as well as through the project drawings. A360 also lets project leads interact by leaving comments that can be replied to, building up a history of the instructions, design changes and updates provided. This gives full traceability of information, held in a single workspace that can be consulted at any time.

Also essential for us is the feature, often not particularly well developed on other platforms, that lets you upload different versions of the same 3D model while keeping a history of uploads through versioning.

The model can be exploded into its individual components, so that every element can be analysed in detail. You can also search, filter and locate information within the project files and in the data archive.

The platform lets us manage file access permissions precisely: we can decide which team members have viewing or editing rights, ensuring privacy and security for us and our clients.

Having introduced this new process in our team, we can work together at the same time and manage the changes made by each user, avoiding potential misunderstandings and overlaps.

We want this tool to become part of our best practice: this experience of sharing review tools can be repeated both with other clients and as an internal policy, aimed at optimisation and at the quality of the final product.

All this is the result of a happy meeting between the features that innovation offers and the need for traceability over time and in content.”

Our company has set out to renew its relationships with its clients, proposing new systems and new criteria for assessing work, no longer tied to time, to the “delivery schedule” and to presence in the office, but to quality and to how quickly goals are reached.

It is therefore a genuinely innovative process linked to BIM, to new technologies and to the use of systems that, while once optional, are now becoming indispensable.