Colliers Engineering & Design (CED) is a multidisciplinary architecture, engineering, and consulting firm with more than 40 years of experience delivering projects across the US. With more than 80 offices and a team of more than 3,000 professionals, the company supports a wide range of services, including architecture and infrastructure, survey and geospatial, telecommunications and energy, as well as project management.
As CED scaled—completing 19 acquisitions in four years—the amount of data, tools, and workflows the company managed grew rapidly. With more than 12 terabytes of data, 14,000 projects, and 36 file stores spread across newly combined teams, the need for a more unified and cloud-ready strategy became urgent.
For years, CED relied on a patchwork of storage systems and processes—many inherited from acquisitions. Managing user access across Autodesk products became increasingly difficult, and more than 830 user accounts sat on the backend, often with inconsistencies or legacy configurations. The result: user downtime, duplicate support cases, and a constant risk of teams losing access during transitions.
CED needed enhanced collaboration, better data governance, stronger security, and a way to keep pace with its rapid growth. Most importantly, they needed a more structured, predictable process for working with Autodesk—not a new support experience with every case.
This growing complexity led CED to explore cloud-based solutions that could scale with the company’s ambitions while reducing the technical debt accumulated over years of expansion.
“As we started to grow and added new teams through acquisition, managing that scale became more complex,” says David Prontnicki, a Digital Solutions Manager at CED. “The shift to Autodesk Forma was pivotal to break down silos, streamline management, and align with Autodesk’s roadmap for the future.”
To meet these challenges, CED partnered with ARKANCE (Jessica Miller, Sr. Director) and Autodesk (Alex Sugg, Technical Solutions Executive and Lee Sullivan, Sr. Customer Success Manager) as a Business Plan customer. Together, the three organizations created a unified strategy to analyze the current environment, define end goals, run metric-based pilot programs, and implement a comprehensive training and rollout plan.
“The relationship among the three organizations was imperative to us,” Prontnicki says. Working with Autodesk Customer Success and ARKANCE enabled CED to move with clarity and confidence—aligning technical decisions with business goals while ensuring changes would scale across 80+ offices.
“Our approach at ARKANCE is to strategically align with our customers to support meaningful transformation,” says Jessica Miller, Sr. Director of the A&E Business Unit at ARKANCE.
“When customers, partners, and vendors trust that we’re all aligned on the same outcomes, collaboration becomes natural and success becomes shared. Open dialogue and a genuine collaborative mindset are what elevate these engagements to high-impact partnerships – and make them truly enjoyable to be a part of.”
A cornerstone of the partnership was CED’s transition from Autodesk Vault to Autodesk Forma. The move consolidated 36 file stores into a single cohesive cloud solution, ensuring teams across divisions could access, manage, and collaborate on project data from anywhere.
Forma also provided deeper integration across disciplines—critical in a firm where survey, infrastructure, and architecture teams must often work in lockstep.
To support this shift, CED, ARKANCE, and Autodesk developed a clear roadmap that included pilot groups, defined success metrics, and phased deployment. The result was a smoother, more predictable transition for thousands of users.
—David Prontnicki, Digital Solutions Manager, Colliers Engineering & Design
A key element of CED’s approach was building the transition around the needs of its users. The firm relied heavily on power user groups—trusted experts from a range of disciplines—who tested new workflows, validated tools, and surfaced feedback early.
Regular communication, internal updates, and transparent decision-making helped ensure that leadership and end users understood the “why” behind each change.
This user-centered approach also led CED to establish its Design Technology Services (DTS) team, which now plays an essential role in guiding digital change and partnering with IT to make strategic decisions.
CED embraced a phased, iterative rollout model. Internal testers explored new configurations first, followed by trusted advisors, then larger groups across the company.
The DTS team documented pain points, gathered metrics on efficiency and adoption, and provided leadership with targeted reports showing ROI and systemic improvements. This strategy ensured that the cloud adoption journey stayed grounded in real data—not assumptions.
Not all challenges had off-the-shelf answers, particularly as CED transitioned complex workflows into the cloud. Working alongside ARKANCE and Autodesk, the team developed custom solutions to support survey database workflows, address Desktop Connector locking issues on large datasets, and fill functional gaps unique to CED’s multidisciplinary environment.
This collaborative approach ensured that the new cloud workflows didn’t disrupt established practices—they strengthened them.
“Having the premium support, having the partner, and having the access to the Autodesk Forma team was integral,” says Joseph Gaffney, Director of Design Technology Services.
CED supported the transition with detailed documentation, internal videos, and hands-on sessions. Training wasn’t limited to first-time rollout—it became an ongoing program to ensure users stayed confident and productive as new capabilities were introduced.
Alongside Forma adoption, CED worked with Autodesk to resolve inconsistencies in the 830+ Autodesk accounts inherited from acquisitions. Autodesk assembled a dedicated, cross-functional team—including Client Services, Identity Management, Access Fulfillment, and Technical Adoption Specialists—to unify user identities and eliminate access issues.
This effort significantly reduced risk and ensured smoother onboarding for new employees during future acquisitions.
By transitioning 36 files stores and their legacy workflows to Autodesk Forma, CED was able to double its process efficiency, standardize workflows, and optimize license and data management practices. And through strategic planning, user-centered change management, and deep collaboration, the company built a more unified, scalable, and resilient digital foundation.
“For the DTS team at Colliers Engineering & Design, this initiative was about equipping our people with reliable, scalable tools,” says Joseph Gaffney, Director of Design Technology Services. “More than a technology transition, it was a strategic, collaborative effort—built on trust, aligned around shared objectives, and focused on our users. That alignment ultimately became the foundation of our success.”
Their transformation delivered measurable benefits:
Centralized project data management, replacing 36 file stores with one cloud platform
2x increase in process efficiency when transitioning from their legacy workflows to Autodesk Forma
Enhanced collaboration across 80+ offices
Secure, consistent access to project data from anywhere
Seamless integration between Autodesk tools and existing workflows
Scalable systems aligned with CED’s long-term growth strategy
“Utilize your technology partner, utilize Autodesk…talk to them about all their tools,” says John Gray, Application Success Manager. “They came through big for us.”
