Lyell McEwin Hospital, Hansen Yuncken
Aconex saves time and money on hospital redevelopment
Client
Hansen Yuncken is one of Australia’s largest privately owned construction companies. It employs around 400 staff and has offices in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Cairns, Shepparton, Albury-Wodonga and Newcastle.
Project
Hansen Yuncken is the head contractor on the Lyell McEwin Hospital Redevelopment in South Australia. Lyell McEwin Hospital provides a comprehensive range of specialist and diagnostic treatment services to approximately 196,000 people. The redevelopment included the complete replacement of over 34,000 square meters of medical facilities which was carried out over two stages within a fully operational hospital facility.
Stage B of the development cost $35 million and included construction of a new mental health, linear accelerator and radiotherapy facility; refurbishment of existing buildings and upgrading building infrastructure in 20 separate stages of work. The redevelopment is due for completion in 2009.
Requirements
Based on previous projects, Hansen Yuncken were aware that over the course of the hospital redevelopment thousands of documentation and correspondence items would be created and shared between project team members. Traditional methods of information management, such as paper documents, couriers and email, would have been time consuming, expensive and open to risk, so a project-wide solution to information management was required that supported fast access to, and distribution of, data and could also track communication between team members.
Solution
Hansen Yuncken selected Aconex to manage documents and formal correspondence. Aconex is a web-based system that enables project participants to manage their information using one central platform. The system allows internal and external participants to view, distribute and track their files electronically at any time and from any location.
To date on the Lyell McEwin Hospital project, more than 680 participants from 176 organizations used Aconex to store and manage more than 84,000 documents and distribute over 111,000 correspondence items.
Aconex enabled team members to store and share drawings and specifications using the system, speeding up the review process and eliminating expensive and inefficient paper based communications. When documents and mail had been sent, they could be tracked over the system to check their status and identify bottlenecks.
Chris Pratt, Construction Manager for the redevelopment, said, “Aconex provides a low cost mechanism to exchange information. Document records are easily maintained and the system saves heaps of office space – we have about 10 CDs to store 40– 45,000 documents. It now only takes us a few minutes to create, transmit and print a document.”
He added: “Tracking documentation is so much easier – there is no other way. Without the system, it would take so much more time. Aconex has an excellent document management system.”
Aconex allows all project partners to be connected in real time, so that no matter where project teams are located, they all have the same information. Pratt said, “Aconex certainly improves the control of information. It emulates the more traditional collaboration process but there is also a high degree of certainty that, for example, all phases of a document will be managed correctly.”
A key feature of Aconex is its audit trail that keeps a record of document revisions and ‘who did what and when’ on a project. The trail provides a secure archive of every transaction since the beginning of the project including every document revision. Hansen Yuncken found that the audit trail brings considerable peace of mind. “The Quality Assurance process is automatic,” said Pratt. “Auditors see Aconex and give it a big tick.”
Aconex is the world’s largest provider of web-based collaboration solutions to the construction and engineering industries. The company has more than 30 offices worldwide servicing projects valued at $180 billion.
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