Reef Island, Davis Langdon & Seah International
Commercial, Residential Resort on a Man-Made Island
Project
Due for completion in 2009, Reef Island is a $1.2 billion, commercial and residential development situated on a 579,000m² man-made island off Manama in Bahrain.
The development will include the construction of 39 residential buildings, a 300-room five star hotel, 39 beach villas, a tower, restaurants, shopping arcades, a yacht club, an aquarium and an exhibition centre.
Land reclamation for the project was completed in 2005 and the marine works were completed in early 2007. Infrastructure works, including roads, electricity, water, sewerage and telecommunications were completed later that year. Construction commenced mid-2007, with the first phase scheduled to be completed in early 2009 and the second by the end of 2010.
The developer is Mouawad Group for Real Estate Development Company and Lulu Tourism Company, and consultancy firm Davis Langdon & Seah International is the project manager.
Challenges
Lulu Tourism Company was aware that a large volume of information – potentially millions of documents and correspondence items – would need to be stored and exchanged over the project’s lifecycle. Managing this flow of information would be complicated due to the large, dispersed project team, which involved specialist consultants from around the world. This would make it more difficult to communicate, and using tools such as paper documents and individual email accounts would have been expensive, inefficient and slow down the collaboration process.
In addition, the development was being built over two phases and to tight schedule, and so the project managers required a system that could present bird’s eye view of project progress and highlight any bottlenecks.
Solution
Lulu Tourism Company selected the Aconex document management and collaboration solution to support the delivery of its project.
Aconex is a web-based platform for storing and sharing project information, such as drawings, documents and correspondence. The system allows project participants to view, distribute and track their files electronically at any time and from any location. To ensure everyone is competent using the system, on-the-ground training and round the clock support is made available to all participants.
Results
Through using Aconex, project participants are able to collaborate in real time, regardless of their location. Spencer Wylie, project manager at Davis Langdon & Seah International, said, "We have consultants in Bahrain, Dubai, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Spain and the UK. Everyone can access the Aconex system and it's real time, so information can be accessed 24 hours a day.”
A key requirement for the project was being able to correspond quickly with other team members, on items such as requests for information and advice. Users benefited from managing this through one system and from being able to track the status of each piece of project mail.
"Aconex is two-fold, a system for managing both mail and documents,” said Wylie. “As a mail system, you can issue memos, emails, instructions, meeting notices, and other items and it is fully recorded. You send a mail and it’s tracked, so you can be sure everyone has received it. Each organization has maybe 20 users within the organization and you need that one point of contact. Everyone has access to all of their information. Obviously you can make items confidential if you need to."
Project team members also use Aconex to store and share drawings and documents. Data can be searched for using criteria such as date ranges, sender and recipient details, document types, status and keywords. Files can then be distributed electronically using the system. An audit trail keeps a record of document revisions and ‘who did what and when’, to ensure accountability and that everyone is working from the latest version of each file. Wylie believes this has helped automate manual processes and cuts down the time spent hunting for files.
Wylie said: "You upload drawings, documents, cost plans and other files onto the system and they're registered. Every time you upload again, it renumbers and renames the document and tracks the changes as well, so you can look at revision one, two, three, four, five at the click of a button, rather than going to a drawing file and pulling up drawings. It's all in one place and it's all linked through the system. It shows you exactly who's made the change, when the changes were made, who's looked at it, who's reviewed it, and whether it's been approved or not approved."
Before using Aconex, Davis Langdon used a combination of hard copies and soft copies to share documents, which was very demanding of bandwidth.
"There's so much information flying about on the project," says Wylie. "Last month on Aconex we had 6,300 mail transactions. We transmitted nearly 3,000 documents to 14 organizations and we're storing 18,000 megabytes of information on their system now. So can you imagine trying to upload that all through your email system?"
Aconex is delivered as a service via the web. The client pays a monthly fee for the project to use the system, so no large, lump-sum investment is required, and the system can be used as long as the project runs. Ongoing maintenance and upgrades are all managed by Aconex, removing the need for internal IT resources.
"The cost relative to the size of the project is absolutely minimal," says Wylie. "The time saved for the client and the client's team far outweighs the cost that Aconex charges. In download time of drawings alone you would make the money up in a month, quite easily. I would say it repays itself almost immediately."
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