REDCON CONSTRUCTION
Redcon Construction adopts digital transformation and improves design workflow by 85%
Share this story
Using BIM to build Egypt’s cityscape
Redcon Construction has been operating in Egypt for over 25 years with a track record of over 150 completed projects. Today, Redcon simultaneously manages around 30 projects, from design to construction. With the help of a digitized workflow, they've seen an 85% saving on time in both design collaboration and design change management.
ElAlamein Tower LD 06
Overview
Although the global pandemic slowed down the construction industry worldwide, Egypt has shown signs of a quick rebound thanks to infrastructure investment from the government. A report on Egypt’s construction industry states that the country is expected to record a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 9.9% by 2024, to reach EGP 535.1 billion. The report also indicates that the commercial building construction market in value terms is expected to record a CAGR of 12.1% over the same forecast period.
“The construction industry in Egypt is booming and the volume of work at Redcon has increased dramatically,” says Ahmed Assem Ahmed Ragheb, Deputy COO at Redcon Construction. This incredible growth has led to the restructuring of the organization to ensure it maintains the project quality that it delivers to clients.
“Once we reached the point of about 25 running projects it became much more difficult to control and have a full overview of each of the projects,” says Ragheb. Therefore, in 2019, the company chose to adopt Autodesk’s BIM Collaboration Solutions. “We needed a solution to help us manage our growing teams and give us a better overview of all our projects.”
Alamein University – Model and Reality Capture
Laying the roadmap for success and streamlining communications
Redcon introduced BIM processes into their organization with the plan of improving design coordination across its multi-discipline departments. It also wanted to introduce better engineering options for its clients.
With the help of Autodesk’s team in the Middle East, Redcon was able to make this transition in record time, and without any impact on their day-to-day activities. With the adoption of BIM, Redcon was able to improve the quality of its project outcomes while enabling better design coordination and collaboration across the company’s multidiscipline departments. Ragheb adds that it was of utmost importance to have the company’s 240 engineers, who work across multiple projects at the office and onsite, work on a Common Data Environment (CDE).
“With the increase in demand for Redcon’s services, the company faced a number of challenges in managing their fast-growing teams.”
—Hany Shabana, Major Accounts Manager, Autodesk.
Alamein University – Model and Reality Capture
“Our goal was to improve coordination across all our working teams. Now that teams have access to the latest project information in one central place, exchanging comments, markups and RFI’s has become easy to manage and it has eliminated a lot of IT difficulties.”
For many companies in the construction industry, information is still shared via email, this makes it near impossible to track issues and keep relevant project information centrally available to all stakeholders. It was Redcon’s mission to remove these silos that hamper productivity and efficiency in the project workflow environment. “We have unified all these applications to work in one seamless workflow, from the technical office to site teams, all our projects now work on a single CDE thanks to our BIM implementation,” says Ragheb.
Not only are Redcon revising all their projects with 3D models using BIM, but the company is also implementing 4D and 5D as well. With 4D, the new variable is the time which allows Redcon to better plan their projects with detailed scheduling data that evolves over time, whereas 5D is all about managing cost estimations, analysis, and budgetary tracking.
"Redcon is planning to even synchronize the data from all departments through a single platform between Sites and Head office, the choice was Autodesk BIM solution as it will connect all the department and site management on the same Model. That will provide a single source of truth through the project life cycle and will make the project tracking more effective.”
—Mohamed ElSarha, BIM Section Head, Redcon Construction
4D and 5D BIM Construction Simulation
Improving efficiencies, saving costs, and going green
For Redcon, saving time and costs are critical to achieving success in an extremely competitive market. The company also conducted a survey to see what the real-time savings in the organization were after the implementation of BIM 360, the numbers were nothing short of impressive. With Autodesk’s solutions in place, Redcon saw an 85% saving on time in both design collaboration and design change management.
Redcon was so impressed with Autodesk’s BIM solutions that it will be implementing Connected BIM across the entire organization. This strategy will also align them with their goal towards running paperless projects and implementing full digital transformation on all their projects.
Redcon has already reduced its paper usage on projects by 25% and the company is expecting this figure to rise to 60% by the end of 2021.
“BIM is one of the most important technologies used in construction. It enables the contractor to have a full view of the project and allows for coordination between the different disciplines to detect clashes or other problems, ensuring that no rework will need to be performed”. He adds that by using the latest technology, the company may save up to 30% of the cost expenses in the execution phase of the project
—Dr. Mohamed Salama, Engineering Sr. Manager at, Redcon Construction
Shop Drawing status Tracking using Revit
Leading the way for Digital Transformation
There is a growing demand for the adoption of BIM from other big developers in Egypt and the government has now also made it mandatory to submit BIM-based project work. While Redcon has been able to onboard the latest technologies with little effort, Ragheb says that is becoming exceedingly difficult for subcontractors to keep up with the technology. “We need to exhort more effort to help subcontractors onboard BIM and help them to start working on the same platform as us.”
Ragheb also offers a word of advice for contractors, “Contractors who do not adopt BIM and digital transformation will lose out on work in the future. With projects becoming more complicated, not adopting BIM will definitely put the project completion at risk due to rework that will need to happen on-site.” He adds that contractors who are not capable of digital transformation will lose out to international competition who will take projects away from local businesses. Technology is playing a critical role in the transformation of the construction industry in Egypt he adds.
Shefaa ElOrman Hospital – Model vs Reality
See related products
Access the Page
Share this story
