Arup goes digital for project delivery

In seeking to guarantee quality deliverables to their clients, engineering consulting firm Arup continually found themselves running into issues during manual design reviews.

The lack of standard markups within the review processes kept stakeholders occupied with document management as opposed to focusing on design and execution.

Review timeframes were bloated due to the reliance on email and postal services for the heavy project collaboration, and that’s when Bluebeam Revu came in.

Bluebeam Revu is a project efficiency and collaboration solution used by more than 1.3 million AEC professionals worldwide.

Going from manual to digital

Given the firm’s commitment to leveraging technology for project delivery, Arup began to explore ways in which manual processes could be digitised for efficiency, quality, risk mitigation and standardisation across multiple offices and projects.

A key pain point Revu addressed was the issue with older or low-quality as-built drawings and scans.

Arup Senior Technician Ben Taylor said the company sometimes had points where they wouldn’t submit deliverable to the client, since the native resolution and outputs were limited by traditional PDF products.

“Revu helped solve these issues by actually giving us the interoperability and the functions that we needed to be able to edit them on the fly and modify them to actually suit the client requirement,” Mr. Taylor said.

“This allowed project partners to spend less time deciphering as-built drawings and scans, and more time focusing on their respective aspects of project delivery.”

Collaborating in real time and mitigating risk

Regional CAD Lead Russell Bunn said Bluebeam covers a range of aspects, with risk mitigation being central.

“It does improve the communication of the team because efficiencies are gained when people are coming to action the markups, and we can also be confident that every single drawing has the same markup in the same place and says the same thing,” Mr. Bunn said.

Bluebeam Studio Sessions offers a way to create simultaneous, real-time collaboration across separate locations.

“We didn’t have an effective method of being able to communicate in real time and submit markups, it was just email trails,” Mr. Taylor said.

“Bluebeam Studio solves all of those issues. Someone’s marking up drawings in London and they come through live in the Sydney office as we’re doing work and while people are talking on the phone – it eliminates confusion and errors in communication via email.”

According to Mr. Taylor, live comments also create a single source of truth, allowing project partners to quickly assess review progress and ensure the partners are working on only the most current documents.

Looking towards the future

Mr. Bunn said Arup’s culture of innovation fosters an organic approach to technology, keeping the company ahead of the curve.

“Revu really helped us move towards a paperless office, with a paperless future ahead and better collaboration taking place, Arup continues to build upon the firm’s legacy as an industry leader,” Mr. Bunn said.

“Going digital is so important for Arup because it’s the future.”

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