Transforming water infrastructure

Water treatment is critical national infrastructure, a silent essential service under intense pressure. Across the UK, investment levels are expected to triple over the next five years to meet tightening environmental regulations and growing demand. For RSE (Ross-shire Engineering), that pressure is also an opportunity. Originally rooted in the Scottish Highlands, RSE has spent four decades expanding into a national force, treating water projects not as static building sites but as high-precision manufacturing exercises, delivering results up to 50% quicker than traditional methods.

"The biggest challenge is the volume of investment expected over the next five to six years," says Kes Juskowiak, Operations Director at RSE. "You're looking at doubling or tripling the rates of investment. So how do you do that through traditional means?" For RSE, the answer lies in standardizing designs, building off-site, and using digital tools to compress the time between design, fabrication, and commissioning. That depends, in turn, on information flowing cleanly between teams, without version conflicts or communication gaps.

RSE's Digital team identified Forma (previously Autodesk Construction Cloud) as a solution after South Staffordshire Water approached them to take on a project at Hampton Loade WTW with a specific requirement: BIM-compliant delivery within a common data environment.

"We didn't have a common data environment at that time," recalls Jill Joiner, Head of Digital at RSE. "So we looked at our toolset and identified Forma as a route forward." RSE already used Autodesk tools for manufacturing, so the move to Forma was a natural extension rather than a leap into the unknown. Starting with 25 licenses, within months, the internal response was strong enough to push that to 50, and then further still.

The blockers that had always slowed progress, accessing models directly, sharing information efficiently, collaborating across disciplines, were simply removed. Forma has since been deployed to nearly 600 users across RSE, with project uptake increasing more than tenfold in the past year alone.

RSE's modular model means design and build run in parallel, so the design office and workshop floor need to function as one. "Using Forma, we can share that model, and everyone can collaborate in it together," says Cameron MacDonald, Design and Digital Manager. Engineers now raise issues, input into decisions, and contribute directly to change rather than receiving it as a finished output.

For the Hampton Loade WTW project, South Staffordshire Water was brought into that same environment, accessing the model and engaging with the process in real time. "That created a healthy environment, more open to change and trust," adds Cameron. Revision history was now complete and auditable, and drawings were no longer printed.

The Forma Issues module has had the most immediate day-to-day impact. Before Forma, issue management ran through email chains, messaging apps, and informal conversations. Design leads had no reliable way to track what was being raised, resolved, or outstanding across a complex multi-disciplinary program.

"We've always been collaborative in nature," says Ewa MacDougall, RSE BIM Lead. "But maybe lacked the channel that connects everything together. The Issues tool is helping us bridge all the communication channels to go via one station. People can add issues and share them directly with the design office. The designers can reply without going through intermediaries. And the design leads have a full log of what's actually going on."

By using Forma's open API to build a compliance checker and automate data transfer between systems, RSE reduced manual effort in that process by 80% and lifted its client compliance rate from 70% to 99%. Project creation on Forma is now fully automated and connected directly to its ERP system, removing the administration overhead entirely.

Digitization is not only an efficiency story. The water industry is becoming more demanding about what it expects from suppliers before they even reach the tender stage. Information security is now a minimum requirement rather than a differentiator.

"We have to be working towards these areas or we don't even get on frameworks," says Jill Joiner, Head of Digital. "A lot of the information we hold isn't ours. It's the client's designs, their security information. How we manage that risk is important."

The drive towards BIM compliance, consistent naming conventions, and standardized data delivery is increasingly client-mandated. Forma's structure, controlled access, auditable records, standardized naming, support compliance as a built-in feature of the workflow rather than an additional overhead.

RSE works closely with Man and Machine, its Autodesk partner, to ensure the platform continues to evolve to meet the specific demands of the water sector. Forma was not originally built around water industry requirements, and the collaboration between RSE, Man and Machine, and Autodesk is actively shaping how the product develops. "RSE is operating at the frontier of what the platform currently offers," says Nathan Brownsword, Sales and Marketing Director at Man and Machine. "And its deployment is increasingly the reference point for other organizations in the sector considering the same journey."

RSE's ambition is not to manage Forma as a software deployment. It's to make digital delivery the default mode of operation for every project. "It's about making innovation business as usual," says Ewa.

What Forma has changed, beyond process efficiency, is the culture around data. Users who once treated information as something that simply needed to exist are now asking what can be built from it. Dashboards, automated connections, integrated reporting. The next horizon is the Assets tool, in which RSE sees significant scope for tracking and connecting data across the full lifecycle of the treatment units it delivers, from fabrication through commissioning to long-term asset management.

From 25 licenses on a single contract to nearly 600 users across a national business, RSE's deployment of Forma reflects the same logic that drives its engineering model: take something proven, build it out, and do it better than anyone else. "The goal is to keep raising the bar," concludes Kes. "We know we're delivering a product that's going to work on day one to day 1,000." In an industry facing the kind of investment surge that water is about to see, that kind of certainty is exactly what the market needs.