Web collaboration is changing the way we work
Can you afford to get left behind?
- Margins are being squeezed. The focus is on efficiency. It's essential to get the job done on time and within budget.
- Projects are becoming complex. More and more often, specialist disciplines come in alongside the traditional key participants.
- Partly because of the need for specialists, there’s a trend for projects to involve people from multiple locations. The largest construction and engineering projects can involve 40 or more participating companies from dozens of countries
All of these factors combine to make traditional paper-based project communication unreliable, slow and costly. In a word, it's obsolete.
And while technology has made it easier to create and distribute data quickly, it has become harder to manage and track these large volumes of information using those traditional processes.
For example, CAD software makes the creation and revision of documents easier than ever, but it has significantly increased the number of documents in distribution. Traditional document management systems have taken the place of the filing cabinet, but in doing so have created a world of hidden files: charts on people’s laptops, budgets on servers, old versions on FTP sites, and approvals hidden in emails.
The old way of managing this information separated its indexing (often in spreadsheets), distribution (by post, courier or fax), and storage (hard copy filing in locked rooms and warehouses).
The result was duplication, high costs in tracking and control, correspondence management problems and the ever-present risk of information loss. Organizations often ended up using in-house systems and becoming disconnected from other project teams.
A system that provides a single, real-time view of accurate information is essential for delivering projects within budget, on time and without dispute.
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Web collaboration – the new competitive advantage
The way it was before, only better
Enter web collaboration: web based systems that control document storage and allow professional collaborative communities to work together.
The availability of a secure, online working environment has started to turn the market for construction and engineering services into a global one: collaboration on potential projects is no longer limited by geography. An architect in London and an engineer in Malaysia can tender for a project in Dubai, each confident of being a key team member if successful.
With the penetration of broadband, the falling cost of information storage, and the increasing need for document control and security, web collaboration has allowed companies and projects of all sizes to gain a competitive advantage in the global market. They have done this while streamlining communication, reducing costs, gaining from engineering and construction project management efficiencies and controlling risk management.
And best of all, web collaboration services like Aconex have allowed them to do all of this without changing standard industry work practices that have proved their worth over many years.
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See also:
Learn more about the benefits of Aconex
Find out how web collaboration with Aconex works
Read about the Aconex team