Having adopted ACC across multiple project roles and phases, the company has streamlined workflows, improving quality and enhancing safety, while saving time and resources, and reducing waste.
In 2019, SSEN Transmission began in earnest to work towards its ambitious 2030 Net Zero goals and work to support UK energy security targets. That involved a £22bn investment to upgrade the network infrastructure across the north of Scotland, including developing new substations and upgrading existing ones.
That in turn meant a huge increase in its project portfolio and a fivefold increase in its workforce – these projects now support up to 8,400 jobs in the region.
“We couldn’t possibly deliver that work with the way of working and tools we used then,” explains Michael Milligan, Engineering Manager. "We had to deliver double the amount of infrastructure in half the time, so we had to innovate.”
As a civil engineer, Michael started looking at how Civil 3D could interact with Revit. He quickly realised that to be most effective, they would need to embrace innovation, adopt a common data environment and work to seek ISO 19650 accreditation [the international standard for building information modelling (BIM)].
From there, SSEN Transmission’s use of ACC has grown, with many teams across the business, from early adopters in CAD led by Clare Montgomery (CAD SME) and engineering to on-site teams and project leadership, working to adopt these new digital tools. This has involved change on a massive scale, but it’s certainly for the better — 88% of people at SSEN say document and design management has improved since ACC was implemented.
At the outset, the team adopted a ‘fail fast and fix it’ approach, where they started with a small number of ACC licenses and tried it out on some in-flight pilot projects. In parallel, SSEN Transmission transitioned its internal CAD team into working solely on ACC.
Working with internal design, it was able to move quickly, raising the bar and the expectations of its leadership team. This helped with real life examples and visualisation to support the wider business change. (Learn more in Stop, Collaborate and Listen, an Autodesk University session led by Michael Milligan and Clare Montgomery of SSEN Transmission.) “Instead of trying to figure out how it might work, we learned it was best to implement it on a project and see how it went,” says Mohammed Naji, BIM manager. “The best thing about it was that it was very easy to learn. Now we encourage people to do everything in ACC, including sending files, capturing meeting minutes and so on.”
The team quickly saw the benefits and ACC use grew fast. “We have 93 live onshore and offshore projects on ACC, with a further 194 live projects transitioning to ACC by April 2026. All new projects will also be on ACC,” says Michael.
Inevitably, the transition has involved significant upskilling across the organisation. “There is huge education and knowledge-sharing work involved, where we show people how they can do things more easily or efficiently than they used to,” explains Mohammed Naji.
Researching workflows and responsibilities is also vital when it comes to working out how to make the most of ACC. “We have to talk to people across the organisation to understand what work is being done, how we can make the process better and how we can capture it and share it with everyone.”
So far, the education work has proven successful, with 85% of people at SSEN Transmission saying they understand the BIM process and 84% saying they understand how the company uses ACC.
SSEN is increasingly using ACC throughout projects, meaning on-site teams are also making the most of it. They have digitised their weekly diaries and day-to-day note-taking, for example.
“We can take notes and images, and record site progress, directly on the platform while we’re on site, which initiates our weekly reports. Using the ACC app reduces admin and gives us at least 20% more time on site, rather being on the laptop doing admin,” explains Ewan Macfarlane, the lead site construction manager.
While Ewan says this time saving is a real benefit, it’s second to the consistency they’ve gained using checklists and other ACC features on-site, where as many as 300 people can be working at any one time.
“This helps onboard new staff and have them follow the best proper procedures for site monitoring. The consistent reporting and single source of truth ACC can provide also helps the wider project team.”
Alistair McDonald, Project Manager, adds he previously got vastly different formats and levels of detail in the weekly reports he was sent by different construction managers. “With the new rollout of the weekly report in ACC, it’s much more consistent,” he says. “It highlights everything the guys are doing on site but also calls out anything my assistant project manager and I need to look at or progress.”
Working with Tier 1 contractors, for example on its Skye project, SSEN Transmission sets up a collaboration space within ACC where all involved can work together in real time.
“It stops the back and forth of emails or phone calls and removes the loop of endless document submission and commenting,” says project manager Daniel Sutherland. “People can see what's happening in real time and can give input. That streamlining has been really helpful from a project management perspective.”
When it comes to managing contractors, Daniel also finds having a complete project overview in one place incredibly useful.
“I can see how many deliverables my contractors submitted to ACC, which makes my assessment of their monthly application payment a lot easier. I can see if there's any outstanding approvals required and I can see all the issues that have been raised, including how they relate to project maps.”
The team agrees capturing minutes within ACC has been transformative, saving at least half the time that used to be spent following up. “Previously, minutes were done in a separate document and emailed around,” says Lauren McInally, Lead Project Co-ordinator.
"If you had an action on the back of a meeting, you’d have to look in your emails for it. ACC makes it much easier and more efficient, as no one has to chase people afterwards for updates. They can see updates on their dashboards and follow links to issues or other functionalities.”
When it comes to saving time, she adds, they have seen significant benefits in hazard workshops with engineers. “Rather than using the minutes module, we’ve used the issues module template. Instead of recording hazards in a design risk management index (DRMI) template in a standalone spreadsheet, we use ACC, so it’s all connected.”
Initially, SSEN Transmission focused on introducing ACC in critical areas such as contractor engagement. “We're now building it up and making other internal process improvements so we can build a creative, digitally collaborative, cloud-based process from the start of every project,” explains Michael, “so every single meeting or piece of design or geographical reference is logged on the system.
“We're trying to create an environment where we can be decisive, log our decisions and move on, because we don't have the time to flounder.”
He also points to wider benefits of the ACC rollout, including the development of new roles and career pathways at SSEN Transmission for engineers, project managers and project administrators. Moreover, he adds, the company is now partnering with transmission operators to find common ways of working across the industry, to help achieve broader Net Zero and energy security goals.
These large-scale infrastructure projects go through some highly sensitive areas such as peatland, meaning planning must be nuanced. “Having information live on the cloud helped us to calculate the environmental impact, communicate with our stakeholders, avoid the most important areas and make the best decisions from an environmental perspective,” says Michael.
“In the future, we envisage being able to run analytics against designs and project proposals in terms of nature analysis, carbon, costs and so on, which would be presented in something like a chat box, saving us on admin time spent having to compile reports”
Michael says they are now managing overall much better than they did before, despite having an exponentially higher workload. “We have a strategy to engage with our contractors in the very early stages of development and to work together to build design and project processes from the start,” he says.
“Developing our teams, bringing in Revit and Civil 3D, and collaborating on ACC unlocked our teams’ potential for in-house design and lay the platform for growth,” he adds. “It allowed us to develop collaborative relationships with our contractors rather than the transactional approach of the past.”
Building on this foundation Clare Montgomery (CAD SME) has led the way in developing VR capabilities in workshop XR. Over MS Teams, she led beta testing with Autodesk developers in New York. The foundational work in ACC allowed Clare to implement workshop XR within the business and create opportunities for design awareness sessions. She was also able to develop fun games and activities for school STEM events, inspiring the next generation of talent to support the industry.
“Having a collaborative space to develop and grow our capabilities together has been a game changer in terms of the level of engagement and understanding across different teams,” said Clare. “This ensures we think and work in terms of the whole process and shared goals as opposed to taking a transactional approach.”
“Viewing, reviewing, developing and linking models together makes workflows more efficient. Beyond that, an accessible 3D model is easily understood and ideas are communicated clearly from the offset.
“Taking this capability into learning and pipelines, it makes it easier to tell the story of what we are doing, engaging more diverse teams and even inspiring the next generation. A virtual site tour (with a virtual ‘easter egg’ hunt) immediately invokes curiosity during our STEM events. It frequently leads to great discussions about the link from computer game skills like Minecraft to real world careers and projects"
Engineering Manager Gary Huskinson agrees, saying the shift to ACC has definitely changed their working lives. “It’s an intuitive, easy-to-use, one stop shop with a really good search functionality. It’s a really good tool, and we’re constantly looking at and researching further functionality.”
