Today’s construction teams are under increasing pressure to do more with less. While as an industry, we’ve made considerable strides in improving our efficiency, we still have work to do – and we need to do it sooner rather than later. Autodesk Construction Cloud’s Bridge tool helps teams gain efficiency through easier, more accountable and more productive collaboration.
To meet the world’s growing population, we need to build 13,000 buildings each day between now and 2050, according to research from Statista. This is a tall order, and when combined with a construction labour shortage, it's clear we need to find even better ways of working together to keep up with demand.
That's why teams are increasingly moving to design-build delivery methods, which prioritise collaboration, teamwork and trust.
Even if your business isn’t involved in design-build, you can take inspiration from its success in cutting time, cost and errors from construction projects. To reorient your work toward a more productive collaborative approach, you need to:
The Bridge tool within Autodesk Construction Cloud helps teams reach these goals.
Introducing Bridge
Bridge allows teams to work in their own project setups and share information across internal and external projects through a controlled design package workflow.
‘Bridged’ projects automatically sync packages to one another's project timeline, so teams can stay up to date on the latest designs and be confident they’re not falling behind. They can also easily identify changes between versions and determine which disciplines are affected.
Bridge lets teams put their skills directly to work, rather than spending time managing files and permissions.
Let's explore some of the ways Bridge can benefit teams, projects and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) businesses overall.
Improve trust and collaboration in your teams
When forced to work within the same digital environment without guardrails, teams face trust issues. They’re reluctant to share their work-in-progress files and processes. They see risk in accidentally sharing sensitive information, or in missed updates leaving data incomplete. This leads to last-minute and limited collaboration on designs.
Bridge can help address trust issues within project teams by promoting transparency and accountability within the system, all from separate and secure digital environments. Teams can seamlessly share relevant project information and updates, giving them the confidence to show their designs so other stakeholders can provide feedback sooner.
Ultimately, these improvements help teams deliver projects faster. Autodesk and FMI’s industry report, Trust Matters: The High Cost of Low Trust found construction firms where trust is ‘very high’ are twice as confident as others in meeting project schedules and budgets.
Enhance productivity and project outcomes
Bridge helps solve a major pain point in construction: diminishing productivity. ING reports construction labour productivity in Europe has fallen by 15% over the past 25 years – although Belgium and the Netherlands, both leaders in using digitalised construction processes, have seen growth of around 20%.
Bridge helps teams make the most of digitalisation by allowing architects, engineers and trades to work with their own standards, retain their own data, and share their work early and often. Greater frequency and control over sharing becomes the status quo, replacing hesitancy and delay.
In addition, Bridge promotes the smooth flow of data across internal and external teams. Designs and other necessary information are synced across multiple stakeholders with a single click, keeping everyone in the loop and preventing data from slipping through the cracks.
And because stakeholders are sharing designs from their own environments, they retain their data after the project, allowing them to make data-driven decisions for ongoing improvement.
Smooth operations for a healthier bottom line
Standardisation helps you unlock massive efficiency gains, which improves your bottom line.
With Bridge, design firms and trades maintain their own standards, in their own project setups. This also allows teams to work seamlessly across multiple projects and improve upon established best practices and procedures.
No longer do they have to compromise their processes to suit the digital environment they previously had to work in.
Take your projects to the next level
Navigating today and tomorrow's construction landscape requires construction pros to work more closely with other teams, improve data management and use the right construction tech. Bridge supports them in all these aspects by fostering trust and collaboration while ensuring their data is retained for future productivity gains.
