Khansaheb turns connected data into commercial intelligence

Few companies have watched the UAE grow the way Khansaheb has. Since 1935, when the family-owned contractor first began building roads and public infrastructure across the Emirates, Khansaheb Civil Engineering has accumulated a project list that reads like a timeline of the country itself: the first road linking Sharjah to Ras Al Khaimah, the first causeway connecting Abu Dhabi to the mainland, Mall of the Emirates, Raffles Hotel, and the Dubai Exhibition Centre at Expo City, among many more.

Today, Khansaheb operates across five divisions with more than 5,000 people delivering complex civil, building, MEP, and fit-out projects simultaneously. Digital transformation has been a consistent thread in that growth. Over the past several years, the company has moved from paper-based documentation to a fully cloud-hosted project environment, standardized its quality and snagging workflows, and established a common data environment that brought client, design consultants, engineering, site delivery and subcontractor teams onto one shared platform. That foundation made the next step possible.

With project data centralized, a more specific challenge came into focus. The commercial team, including quantity surveyors, estimators, and the people responsible for monthly cost measurement, were largely working from 2D drawings. When they needed quantities extracted from BIM models, they sent a request to the BIM team. The BIM team, occupied with live model management and coordination, would set aside their work, extract the data, and send it back. The process was sequential by design, and slow by consequence.

"The commercial team traditionally relied on 2D drawings or extracted quantities from the BIM team,” says Ahmad Elgammal, Digital Construction Engineer at Khansaheb. "Previously the BIM team had to pause their work to provide the required data. We wanted to eliminate that dependency and create a more efficient, self-service approach."

Valuable data existed in the model, but without a reliable path to the people who needed it, it wasn't working hard enough.

The shift began with Forma Design Collaboration as the platform foundation, standardizing model libraries and workflows across architectural, structural, MEP, and commercial teams. With a common environment in place, the focus moved to surfacing model data for non-technical users without requiring BIM proficiency or intermediation from the BIM team.

The mechanism that has made this possible is Autodesk Data Exchange. Each week, discipline-specific models from the project delivery team are federated. A scheduled publish, triggered automatically every week, extracts a structured dataset and pushes it into Microsoft Power BI. The commercial team receives an automated notification from Power BI with a link to the updated dashboard.

"The link directs the receiver to the updated quantity extraction dashboard," Elgammal explains. "Additional parameters are added as needed, thereby enriching the building information model.”

The dashboard lets commercial users filter by category, such as doors, blockwork, slabs, structural elements, and pull counts, areas, and volumes directly. No modelling knowledge required. Duncan Payne, Head of Support Services, describes where that matters most: "When we're estimating the labor, plant, and materials for a bid, or doing our monthly measure of what's been achieved, we need those quantities to be current, accurate and accessible. Getting to your month-end position faster means more time to deal with the risks you've actually identified."

The workflow is currently live on some of Khansaheb’s largest projects including the Dubai Exhibition Centre at Expo City and Dubai Harbour Residence, a high-end residential development on Dubai’s waterfront, worth nearly $1 billion in construction value.

One of the less obvious benefits of connecting commercial teams to model data has been its effect on the models themselves.

Because quantity surveyors now depend on model data for decisions with real cost implications, modelling errors surface faster. A door not referenced to the correct level, a type name that doesn't match the door register, an element with missing dimensions: these get flagged and corrected much quicker than before.

Commercial engagement has become a quality feedback loop. The accuracy of the model is no longer a BIM team concern alone; it is shared by anyone whose decisions depend on it.

Underpinning the commercial data workflow is a broader set of efficiency wins across Khansaheb's BIM management processes. Sheet production workflows that previously took up to two days now complete in under two minutes, a reduction of over 99%. Coordination issue resolution has dropped from over an hour per issue to under ten minutes, making the process more than 80% faster. Complex calculations involving large volumes of model data that once required days of manual effort now run in under a minute.

Meaningful gains come from AI-assisted automation. Khansaheb uses an AI-powered Revit add-in that enables natural language commands to automate routine model management tasks. A BIM coordinator configures and tests each workflow, which is then deployed across various teams, both within the company and subcontractors. "One person creates the workflow and it spreads across the business," Elgammal says. "That saves a lot of time."

The effect compounds. Faster, more accurate model management means the weekly federated model is cleaner when it is published. Cleaner data means the commercial dashboard is more reliable. More reliable data means the commercial team uses it more with confidence.

The workflow is already changing how commercial information moves through the project lifecycle. At tender stage, Khansaheb is using model-based quantities to support estimating. If a project is won, that data can be carried forward into construction, where the same approach supports monthly measurement, cost control, and labor planning. Over time, it builds a continuous thread of information from bid to delivery, giving teams a stronger basis for comparing early assumptions against live performance.

AI-assisted automation is helping accelerate that ambition by reducing the manual effort that once sat between the model and the decision.

For Jason Sams, Managing Director at Khansaheb, the significance goes beyond any individual workflow. "At Khansaheb, the goal was never just to digitize our projects. It was to harness structured project data that enables our team to make faster, smarter and more confident decisions throughout the project lifecycle."

After nine decades of helping shape the UAE's built environment, Khansaheb is carrying its pioneering mindset into a new era of construction, where data and intelligence are becoming as critical to delivery as concrete and steel.