How BAM Ireland Gained 20% In Quality and Safety With BIM 360 Construction IQ

Boasting 21,000 employees and thousands of projects each year, Royal BAM Group is one of Europe’s most successful construction and engineering companies. They pride themselves on close client collaboration, sustainability, and innovative digital construction.Even as an early adopter and market leader in digital construction techniques, however, in a review of their workflows, BAM Ireland found that many teams were still relying on paper for data collection. The manual workflows were slow, time-consuming, and full of hassles.

Here’s how they tackled the challenge of digitizing these workflows, and achieved a 20% gain in quality and safety on site.

Challenges of Paper Based Processes

BAM Ireland’s traditional data management methods relied on paper-based workflows. In the course of a project, their teams often collected dozens of racks of papers and files, all of which contained valuable project data.

Compiling all that information in a digestible way was a time-consuming task. Besides the time invested in the task, this also meant that all that good data wasn’t being used to its full potential.

_{BAM Ireland’s leadership began seeking solutions that would help them to more fully digitize their processes}

Multiply the effort and waste involved by the 40 to 50 projects that BAM Ireland had going at any given time, and it’s easy to see how daunting data collection and management had become. Furthermore, BAM Ireland’s business was growing and with it, the amount of information and data sets they had access to and needed to manage - creating a situation that was both a blessing and a challenge.

To address the challenge, BAM Ireland’s leadership began seeking solutions that would help them to more fully digitize their processes and create standardization across the entire Royal BAM Group.

The Solution

BAM Ireland began using BIM 360 Insight and Construction IQ to capture data and manage construction work on all levels. Their first projects with Insight and Construction IQ were the Museum of the Future in Dubai and seven Court House projects completed under a public-private partnership across Ireland.

Construction IQ  improved their process by identifying the presence of inconsistencies in the process, and, most importantly, why the inconsistencies had occurred in the first place.

One of the problems identified by Construction IQ was that a number of checklist issues on the construction sites were late. In many cases, this was not a problem with the checklists not being completed, but rather with them being delivered in a timely fashion, due to the lack of digital adoption on site.

In this case, though BAM Ireland already had cutting edge digital processes in place, their adoption required improvement. This gave them a clear vision for the next steps toward improvement.

_{Construction IQ gave BAM the ability to identify high-risk issues through machine learning assisted by human experience}

With Insight and Construction IQ running, BAM Ireland created a machine learning environment to manage their data. This enabled them to manage increasing amounts of project information within an automated system. The system in turn could adapt to new data sets that required changes or new ways of organizing.

Construction IQ also gave BAM Ireland the ability to identify high-risk issues through machine learning assisted by human experience, providing information that made the team more adaptable.

Construction IQ assisted the BAM Ireland team to break down barriers between traditional knowledge silos within the organization and across the industry, and establish better collaboration across all teams.

“Safety is number one. Once we have safety in place, the next thing is to ensure we add value. Having our site engineers out on site with good and accurate information is where we earn money by adding value. I think as long as we can support the process, then those are the key metrics for us. Everything else supports that.” Simon Tritschler, Digital Construction Technical Deployment Specialist, BAM Ireland

Achievements

Construction IQ and Insight supported BAM Ireland in achieving several important benefits:

1. Easy access to a cross-project dashboard that improves BAM Ireland’s management oversight across multiple complex projects. This means that sites can readily communicate what is working well and where improvement is needed, so that best practices can be established across the organization.

2. Dramatically improving data capture techniques, making the workflow 95% digital. Today, only mandatory, legal documents are managed on paper.

3. 25% more time focused on tasks and risk items rather than managing paper. This reduces risk across the entire project lifecycle.

4. Better understanding of the risk profile on each project as well as across the world.

5. Better data and insights to enable stronger decisions, leading to a 20% improvement in both quality and safety.

6. Safer, happier work sites for all employees, improving productivity and morale.

Royal BAM Group is committed to success through innovation. BAM Ireland’s adoption of Insight and Construction IQ demonstrates the valuable wins organizations can achieve through digitizing construction processes.

“Autodesk construction solutions give us visibility on risk and a higher degree of focus. Insight is identifying the problems and constraints that now act as leading KPIs for BAM to identify hotspots, rather than relying on traditional construction intuition. We’re having less reactive conversations with more emphasis on KPIs that can drive continual improvement. The simple visualization of the challenge or the issue alone helps us bring that focus.” - Michael Murphy, Digital Construction Operations Manager, BAM Ireland