With the implementation of a global digital strategy and ramped-up cloud collaboration, global engineering consultancy Buro Happold has brought together teams from across the globe, eased deadline pressure, drastically reduced file opening times, and reduced costs of remote desktop machines by up to 70%.
The monumental effort to build and restore the world’s infrastructure, project by project, is filled with opportunities to learn about human ingenuity enabled by technology.
Cloud technology, with its innate nature to serve as a single source of truth, is an ideal home for the tremendous amounts of data required to plan, design, build, operate, and maintain water, transportation, utility, and other infrastructure systems.
The transition from physical servers to the cloud is offering big returns to those making the investment. Case in point: Buro Happold, an integrated consultancy of more than 3,000 engineers, designers, and advisers working across 29 disciplines in 37 locations around the globe. At Buro Happold, collaboration is a given.
The firm's pioneering use of cloud technology, thoughtfully planned and executed step by step, integrates lessons learned during each project’s progress to inform its overall digital strategy. Team members have implemented a system that is bringing 80-90% improvements in model opening time savings alone.
Buro Happold is pushing beyond the traditional definition of BIM as the building information model, to view it as building information management.
This broader view is a core tenet of this global engineering design consultancy that serves clients in implementing large scale city master planning through to tender design for mix use developments. The firm’s service offering allows them to digital deliver projects through the cloud for an array of building typology types and infrastructure development, including air, rail, roads, water, utilities and the environmental systems.
“We share our projects across the world and our skills across the world, so cloud technology is really important to us,” says Des Kinlough, UK BIM lead at Buro Happold.
Their digital cloud design journey began in 2015. At the beginning, the team asked themselves, “What does the cloud mean, in reality, in our industry?”
Each project is a collaboration between various and sometimes changing individual team members. Some are from the same organization, but many are not. It’s part of the reason project management plays such a crucial and discrete role.
Design process protocols were set and expected to be followed at Buro Happold long before its move to a model-first way of working, but the reality was people worked or connected (or didn’t) in different ways.
To expediate model performance speeds when working from home users sometimes downloaded files to hard drives, potentially causing conflict with updates from other sources. There was difficulty in reviewing and tracking updates and design changes, with team members spending time they didn't have on navigating through the confusion of what changed, where, and when.
“Files would be emailed, files would come through SharePoint, files would be stored on another server in another office,” Kinlough says.
Impacts on any one given infrastructure project, which may include up to 5,000 files or more, become even more considerable on a firm-wide scale.
“There's a lot of downtime, just doing simple things such as opening referencing, updating, printing, and saving. When we had to make a quick change, it wasn't quick,” Kinlough says.
Syncing issues arose during the back-and-forth transfer of files. Data shortcuts and Xref issues further slowed workflows. The net effect of built-up pressure to meet deadlines often negatively impacted team morale.
“Deadline days were very problematic, and that affects everyone's pride in their work, especially when you're feeling like you're working really, really hard,” Kinlough says.
The infrastructure team at Buro Happold had confidence in its plan based on the results and partnership already developed from the firm’s implementation of Autodesk Construction Cloud on its vertical building projects. They started initial testing sample data on BIM 360 in early 2021. From there they transitioned into utilizing Autodesk’s launch of Desktop Connector for BIM Collaborate Pro for Civil 3D in 2022.
The next challenge was to implement it on a real project impacting multiple firm offices.
“We knew it would have lots of utilities drainage earthworks, which means lots of data shortcuts,” Kinlough says of the project chosen.
Excitement from the successes of just a few users tempered some as the project ramped up into the dozens, complicated by 400-500 drawings being accessed by any given team member at peak production. The Buro Happold-Autodesk partnership became invaluable when implementing updates to the platform’s tools to resolve issues related to Desktop Connector.
“We've had lots of discussions with Autodesk and providing feedback, and they've been pushing us as well,” Kinlough says.
Another test project validated the investment.
“As the [next] project went on, we had 22 full Civil 3D models, which produced about 1,200 data shortcuts, produced 900 drawings, and was worked on from five offices across four time zones over a five-month program,” Kinlough says. “So it worked really well.”
He estimates the efficiency gains realized from reducing a 10–20 minute file opening time to just one to two minutes to be between 80 and 90%.
“That is huge,” he says.
Buro Happold’s digital delivery journey is continuing to mature. Autodesk Construction Cloud is now the default location for all its civil and building projects. The firm has implemented this cloud-based technology on 750 projects across 26 offices as of February 2024. They use its dashboard and Power BI to show the returns from the firm’s growing level of collaboration within the cloud.
There are many returns. Kinlough says the firm’s move to the cloud reduced its cost of remote desktop machines by 60 to 70%, providing an overall return even factoring in the need to purchase additional cloud licenses.
Reviewing has become a lot simpler. The Autodesk Construction Cloud solution ensures any given project team member has the most up-to-date information linked to the live model. It enables the creation and tracking of issues for better project management. Coordination module tools federate the models used for clash detection and integrated with the Manage Issues tab in Navisworks, providing integrated cross-platform benefits.
Kinlough advises organizations to give a lot of thought to the development and rollout of a digital project delivery strategy. Important considerations include which and how many projects to start with and who are the right people for the team.
Additional recommendations include:
Test on live data to evaluate results.
Migrate standard project procedures onto an Autodesk Construction Cloud site to Desktop Connector and start small with one model, one set of data shortcuts, one set of sheets, and check that's working with a couple of users before adding more.
Keep up to date on Civil 3D, especially Desktop Connector, to stay on top of changes and advancements, accessing the support provided by the Autodesk teams.
Track live data through dashboarding to measure what modules are being adopted and used and by whom.
The team shares these and many more insights and details from real world examples in the full webinar presentation of Buro Happold’s digital journey.
“This has been a big part of a change in our industry,” Kinlough says.
Discover more at Autodesk’s Digital Project Delivery website and connect with an Autodesk technology expert to discuss how we can help advance your digital project delivery workflows.
