• 460,000m2 mixed-use facility
• Project members in nine countries
• $550,000 saved in print costs
• Review cycles cut by 20%

Client

Founded in Riyadh in 1978, Saudi Oger is one of the leading construction and property development companies in the Middle East. It is now a multi-divisional organization with subsidiaries and affiliates located on four continents.

Project

The Sowwah Square development – also known as the Abu Dhabi Financial Centre – is a 460,000m2 mixed-use facility consisting of four office towers, the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange, retail space and parking. Oger Abu Dhabi, a subsidiary of Saudi Oger, is contracted to construct this luxury, state-of-the-art complex. 

Challenges

The project involved a large, dispersed team that includes specialist consultants from around the world. The shop drawing review process included companies from the US, the UK, Germany, Austria, France, China, Italy, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. From previous projects, Oger knew that this would result in a large volume of documentation being exchanged between participants – and, with tight project deadlines in place, this would need to be done efficiently.

Because of this, a key challenge for Oger was to streamline document review and approval cycles. Their standard process of using hard copies and an FTP site could be time-consuming and, during a five-day review period, team members would often spend an additional two days coordinating, transmitting, downloading and uploading files.

Oger also calculated that, on a project of this size, conducting submittal reviews in the classic way – printing, stamping and distributing hard copy documents – would have been expensive and time consuming. Furthermore, communicating through individual email accounts would have been inefficient and uncertain, due to restrictions on file attachment sizes.

Solution

The client selected to implement the Aconex project collaboration system including its Workflows functionality. The web-based system allows all project participants to access, distribute, track and archive their documents and correspondence using a single, common platform.

Results

In two years, 840 project participants from 85 organizations used Aconex to manage 1.3 million documents and send 500,000 correspondence items – this has resulted in more than 2,000 gigabytes of data being stored on the system.

Gerard Couturier (A&E Division Director), Olga Kondratenko (Corporate Document Control Manager) and Jad El Kawa (A&E Process Engineer) from Oger Abu Dhabi, tracked the impact of using the system and identified the following benefits:

More than $550,000 saved in printing costs

Mr. Couturier said, “Over the first two years of the project, participants generated approximately 65,000 shop drawings including revisions. Without Aconex, this would have required at least four extra prints per drawing, resulting in approximately 200,000 extra print-outs. As a result, this saved us around AED2million (US$554,000) on print-outs.” 

“Providing greater control and saving a considerable amount of time and money.”

Gerard Couturier, A&E Division Director at Oger Abu Dhabi

Increased efficiency and control with Workflows

Mr. Couturier said, “Workflows significantly accelerated and improved the quality of the process. When using hard copies and an FTP site, a 10-day review process often turned into 12 days due to the administrative work required. With Aconex 10 days actually meant 10 days.”

Team members used Aconex to complete 180,000 workflow steps during the drawing review process – steps that would have previously involved far more printing and manual input.

“With Aconex, we were able to run the entire process electronically through one system, providing greater control and saving a considerable amount of time and money; it is also a sustainable solution that saves paper,” said Mr. Couturier.

He added, “Throughout the project, we also had the confidence that all the information captured was being tracked and logged on the system, without the possibility of it being misplaced or deleted. This removed the risk of us losing important files and meant that, if ever a dispute were to arise, we would have an unequivocal record of every transaction stored by a third party.”