WSP Australia
Boosts Efficiency
With InEight
Document Management
Geo-Contextual Document Management is Making It Easy for Field Workers To Find the Right Information, in the Right Place, at The Right Time.
Large engineering and construction projects typically involve correspondingly large volumes of documentation. For users in the field, it can be difficult to find the appropriate information in a timely manner when using a conventional document management solution.
For its 10-year mega program with Sydney Water, the Delivering for Customers (D4C) Joint Venture (JV) is using InEight Document at the heart of a solution that integrates documentation with geospatial information. Field workers use intuitive map based search tools to quickly find the contextual information they need for the assets they are working on.
The direct result is faster and more streamlined work, with less frustration and difficulty for users. And the bigger-picture outcome is better sharing of information between joint-venture partners, freeing up time and focus for innovation.
- Streamlining access to data by eliminating silos
- Maintaining compliance requirements
- Accelerating work, promoting cooperation and innovation
DELIVERING INFORMATION WITHIN A GEOSPATIAL CONTEXT
As one of the three members of the D4C JV in Australia, WSP is providing design, construction, network maintenance and facilities maintenance services for all of Sydney Water’s assets in the Southern Region, within the utility company’s Partnering for Success (P4S) initiative. To support the 10-year engagement, WSP worked to demonstrate the value of a single standardised project controls solution to its consortium partners.
Henry Okraglik, Global Director Digital for WSP in Australia, explains: “Alliance delivery models are becoming more and more common, because mega programs simply can’t access the breadth of services and depth of experience they need through a single provider. When you put together an alliance like D4C, the first thing you must address is your project controls, and what tends to happen is that you end up with a suboptimal patchwork of each company’s preferred tools and approaches.”
As D4C was starting from a blank sheet of paper, with no legacy systems to take into account, the JV asked itself: what’s the best way of getting the right information to the right people in a way that allows them to focus on performing their work?
“As a critical element in the overall systems architecture for our joint venture, we built D4C Create and integrated it with all of Sydney Water’s key systems,” says Okraglik. “InEight Document is the core of the solution, giving our people the power to rapidly find the information they need within the geospatial context of their projects.”
TAKING AN AGILE APPROACH
Throughout the length of the partnering contract, D4C expects to deliver around AU$300 million of work annually to Sydney Water, Australia’s largest water utility. The consortium has over 500 employees and covers assets across an area of 12,700 square kilometres, ultimately serving five million customers.
“D4C Create makes it fast and easy to find what you need, when you need it.”
-Henry Okraglik, Global Director Digital for WSP in Australia
“The senior leaders within the consortium had experienced the pitfalls of piecing together legacy systems from parent companies, so it was easy to get their buy-in for starting from scratch,” says Okraglik. “So that we could get up and running within just six months, we decided to launch as a minimum viable product and then incrementally develop our capabilities. That also made sense in the business context: this was three companies coming together to do something that Sydney Water had never done before. Our approach was: put in the skeleton of what we need, then be agile, learn and adapt over time.”
FINDING NEEDLES IN HAYSTACKS
Making information available and spatially searchable was a key goal for D4C, and the driver for its D4C Create application. Built around InEight Document, and with extensive integration into a wide variety of Sydney Water systems, the solution enables users to interrogate Sydney Water asset data sets and associated information. By zooming into a map, users can immediately find and filter a variety of different data sets associated with the location, and then retrieve documents associated with particular assets.
“For end-users who are not accustomed to working inside document management systems, D4C Create makes it fast and easy to find what you need, when you need it,” comments Okraglik. “Field workers who live and breathe spatial information and work orders can use their standard log-in to access all the power of InEight Document in a very intuitive way. The user experience is wonderfully simple, but the connectivity behind it is highly sophisticated.”
When selecting technologies for use in D4C Create, the number-one criterion was an open API, so that the team could build the required connections with Sydney Water’s systems. “We realised that turning documents in InEight into information that was spatially searchable and user-centric would be critical to our success. That meant achieving deep integration with multiple systems; the open API provided by InEight Document was a big time-saver.”
DRIVING SPEED, EFFICIENCY AND ACCURACY
Among the headline benefits of D4C Create are its high-quality user experience, its ability to provide easy access to a single source of accurate information, and its support for compliant maintenance processes.
“With InEight Document, we’re able to get the right information, in approved documents, served up to the end users at the right time.”
-Henry Okraglik, Global Director Digital for WSP in Australia
“With just a few clicks, field workers can filter down from potentially more than 1,000 documents associated with a site to find the handful that are relevant to the current work order,” says Okraglik. “They don’t have to wade through a whole lot of different screens to find what they want. With InEight Document, we’re able to get the right information, in approved documents, served up to the end users at the right time.”
With rapid, low-effort access to accurate documents through a geospatial interface, D4C employees can easily get the contextual information they need to work in an efficient and compliant way. And from the perspective of the 10-year project, greater speed, efficiency and accuracy will translate into better services and more headroom for innovation.
Okraglik concludes: “The broader benefit is all about getting the work done as efficiently as possible through a data-driven approach. That starts with work orders generated by Sydney Water, and it flows all the way through to D4C operatives in the field. We’re still on that journey, streamlining the operations and analytics, aiming to minimise the human and manual interventions. The InEight technology is a key element in helping us achieve our longer-term goals of optimising the maintenance and maximising the useful life of Sydney Water’s assets.”
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ABOUT WSP GLOBAL
Headquartered in Canada, WSP Global Inc. is a global professional services consulting firm that provides technical expertise and strategic advice to clients in the Transportation & Infrastructure, Earth & Environment, Property & Buildings, Power & Energy and Industry market sectors. WSP has approximately 65,000 employees and experienced 61% revenue growth from its 2016 IPO up to the end of FY 2021. In Australia, WSP plans, designs, manages and engineers long-lasting and impactful solutions to uniquely complex problems.
ABOUT INEIGHT
InEight provides field-tested project management software for the owners, contractors, engineers and architects who are building the world around us. Over 300,000 users and more than 750 customers worldwide rely on InEight for real-time insights that help manage risk and keep projects on schedule and under budget across the entire life cycle. From pre-planning to design, from estimating to scheduling, and from field execution to turnover, InEight has powered more than $400 billion in projects globally across infrastructure, public sector, energy and power, oil, gas and chemical, mining, and commercial. For more information about building trust in your project with real-time data, learn more at www.ineight.com/process-solutions/document-control-turnover.
