AECOM's Project and Construction Management team overcame an extraordinary construction challenge: a 400,000-square-meter landmark development in Shanghai, by centralizing data, standardizing workflows, and unlocking real-time intelligence through Insight in Autodesk Construction Cloud. The result: coordination meeting times cut by over 50%, rework reduced by 10%, and a new benchmark for construction management excellence.
The numbers alone tell a story of scale. A 70,000-square-meter site. A total building area exceeding 400,000 square meters — more than 250,000 of it underground. Around 300 retail stores, 3,000 parking spaces, a podium shopping mall, and multiple office towers, all rising simultaneously in Shanghai's Changning District.
But the true complexity wasn't in the architecture. It was in the coordination. At peak construction, more than 2,000 workers were on site each day, with over 10 major contractors and 200 management personnel operating concurrently. The team was inspecting upwards of 1,500 issues every week. By the end of the project, more than 89,000 safety and quality issues had been documented, tracked, and resolved — all within a compressed 15-month window shaped in part by pandemic-related disruptions.
Xue Xiaoxiang, Project Controls Manager, AECOM
At this scale, traditional approaches to construction management simply wouldn't hold. Any gap in communication or data integrity across dozens of contractors and thousands of workers could cascade into delays, disputes, or costly rework.
AECOM's PCM team had prior experience with Autodesk tools and knew what they needed: not just a system to record what was happening on site, but one that could turn that information into action. Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) became the platform of choice — not as a passive archive, but as the operational backbone of the entire project.
"On previous projects, we saw firsthand what happens when contractors are working from different records — disputes over responsibility, gaps in issue history, difficulty tracing problems to their root cause," says Xiaoxiang. "We chose ACC because we needed one version of truth that every party, including the owner, could rely on from day one."
AECOM mandated that all teams — including every major contractor — upload data to ACC from the outset. But centralization alone wasn't the goal. The team invested upfront in standardization: a comprehensive library of issue templates with mandatory fields, unified naming conventions across disciplines, and predefined root causes. Data entered by a field engineer on the mall level was structurally identical to data from a counterpart on the office tower above.
When issues were created, ACC automatically notified responsible parties. Minor defects could be reviewed and closed through photo submissions alone, eliminating unnecessary on-site re-inspections. Regular contractor training sessions ensured platform adoption wasn't superficial — it was the foundation that made the data reliable enough to act on.
Centralizing data was necessary. But at a project of this scale, the critical question is never simply "what issues exist?" — it's "which issues matter most right now, and what action will prevent downstream risk?"
The team needed to be able to surface life safety risks before they became incidents, spot contractor performance patterns before they became delays, and make labor allocation and milestone payment decisions grounded in objective, current data — not last week's manual report.
Using ACC Insight's Data Connector, the team built custom Power BI dashboards that automatically refreshed each night, delivering daily project summaries and prioritized issue filters to every team member each morning. In weekly quality meetings, selecting a single contractor instantly surfaced all outstanding life safety (A1) and severe impact (A2) issues from the previous two weeks. In one instance, this data directly drove a decision to deploy eight additional electrical workers the following week — a call made with confidence because the numbers left no room for debate.
The efficiency gains were significant. Quality and safety reports that previously required five hours of manual effort each week are now generated daily in five minutes. On-site face-to-face meetings dropped by 30%. Coordination meeting times were cut by over 50% — yet issue resolution efficiency increased by 30–40%, because every participant arrived knowing exactly what needed action.
Xue Xiaoxiang, Project Controls Manager, AECOM
Perhaps the most consequential outcome was one that doesn't show up in a dashboard: the shift in trust between stakeholders. Contractor milestone payments and performance assessments were tied directly to ACC data — a shared, auditable record that no party could dispute. With 99% accuracy in issue assignments and 100% data traceability from creation to closure, rework caused by misrouted tasks was nearly eliminated. The platform gave owners and contractors alike the confidence to move faster and argue less.
The bottom line: rework was reduced by approximately 10%, saving around 2 million RMB in construction costs.
The workflows, templates, and dashboards built for this project have since been shared across AECOM's broader portfolio — turning one project's hard-won lessons into institutional practice.
"Standardizing basic data is the core guarantee for achieving precise, intuitive visualization. The standards established here will set a benchmark for other projects and maximize data value across the board," says Harry Yang, Vice President, PCM, AECOM.
Harry Yang, Vice President, PCM, AECOM
