The unprecedented times we are living are exposing the mindset required to run a company in a remote work regime. Collaborators autonomy and professionality together with the flexibility of the whole team.
Remote working cannot be improvised and Covid-19 is making it clear. We have, have decided to adopt managing policies and paradigms that will allow us to embrace a cultural change that will become endemic in the forthcoming months.
We have chosen to help, through targeted articles, the divulgation of the tools we are using in the hope to advise someone else with what we believe is a best practice.
L’arch. Marzia Ricci, BIM Coordinator for an important Oil&Gas project in Bahrein, is going to explain how here at B1P Group we handle the deliverables in these troubling times caused by Covid-19.
“During these days of lockdown, we managed to tackle the organizational problem. We arranged remote working, overtaking the typical difficulties related to deadlines and project deliveries.
As a matter of fact, this emergency has forced us to isolate ourselves physically and not to have direct contact with our customers introducing a series of inevitable and potential difficulties.
One of the main problems encountered with remote working was about the revision process of our BIM design and site follow-up activities. We promptly resolved this difficulty adopting the A360 platform, made available by Autodesk, which allowed us to carry out the activities remotely while keeping the ordinary quality and respecting deadlines unaffected by this extraordinary working and living situation.
The main advantages that this platform brings are the ability to upload our multidisciplinary BIM models created on Revit to the cloud, the Metric Calculations and the 2D drawings, including title blocks and notes.
Before the emergency, we use to send our projects to our customers as pdf attached to emails. The comments and notes were highlighted on these pdfs and a long and often confusing, exchange of emails followed. After the revisioning process, the sheets were sent back with comments for us to modify them.
Needless to say, this process, still widely used in the field, leads to a considerable waste of time both for our customers and us, slows down our workflow, hinders communication, and can cause loss of information due to poor trackability.
The A360 platform, on the other hand, is offering us a single, shared workspace, where is possible to collaborate in real-time, visualizing and commenting the 2D and 3D files that are generated by the Autodesk Revit model.
This is made very effective by the simple and intuitive interface that does not require to download the file or plug-in for viewing. This is particularly handy on the go.
In this way, the site coordinator, although not physically in front of his workstation, can navigate the model and analyse it in every part.
In the browser, you can easily move between three-dimensional view and saved model views, as well as in project sheets. Additionally, A360 allows project managers to interact with engineers and architects via comments. Everything is recorded, generating a history of indications, design changes and updates that allows for centralization and total traceability of information.
Versioning, often undeveloped on other platforms, is fundamental to us. A360 allows us to upload different versions of the same 3D model, keeping the history of the uploads.
The model can be exploded to its components, to analyse in detail each element that composes it. It is also possible to search, filter and locate information within the project files and in the data archive.
The platform allows us to precisely manage file access permissions. We can decide which team members have viewing or modification rights, guaranteeing privacy and security for us and our customers.
Thanks to the introduction of this new process within our team, we have the opportunity to collaborate simultaneously and manage the changes made by each user, thus avoiding potential misunderstandings and overlaps.
We would like this tool to become our best practice. This experience of sharing review tools can be replicated both with other customers and as an internal policy, to optimise the speed of development and quality of the final product.
All this is the result of the successful match between the features offered by innovation and the needs of traceability over time and in content. “
Our company has embarked on a journey to renew the relations with its customers, proposing new systems and new criteria for evaluating work the “delivery schedule” and presence in the office, but to quality and speed of achievement of the objectives.
It is a real, innovative process linked to BIM, new technologies and the use of a methodology which, if previously could be optional, is now becoming indispensable