How Dura Vermeer Saved 5% On Construction Project Management Costs Per Project

Dura Vermeer Groep NV is a family-owned Dutch company with more than 160 years of experience in construction, engineering, and related services. The company’s core activities are in residential and non-residential building, infrastructure, industrial construction, renovation, and consultancy. They have approximately 2,500 employees and regularly report over €1 billion in yearly revenue.

At the end of 2015, Dura Vermeer signed an Enterprise Business Agreement (EBA) with Autodesk, covering full access to tokenized Autodesk products and success services. The company quickly became one of Autodesk’s biggest adopters of BIM 360, with approximately 75 percent of its workforce using 3D model authoring tools in combination with BIM 360 software and construction project management app.

The Autodesk-assisted implementation of BIM 360, including desktop products and cloud technology, has helped Dura Vermeer manage collaboration around 3D models and streamline information across the whole project lifecycle. This has not only improved communication, collaboration, and decision-making, but has led to a significant reduction in design errors, drawing rework, and fielded issues (known as failure costs).
 

_{Dura Vermeer has been able to streamline and manage collaboration across a project lifecycle, and save on operating costs}

Setting Out Company Goals

Dura Vermeer’s Residential and Non-Residential building division develops, realizes, renovates, and operates projects commissioned by design and construction partners (at their own risk). As a result, project margins are very much dependent on the partners’ performance during various stages of the project lifecycle—from design to construction into maintenance.

One of Dura Vermeer´s goals was to reduce the failure costs by ten percent a year, since this number directly impacts the company’s overall profit margin. Another essential goal was to improve its project win rate, which contributes to overall revenue strongly influenced by positive customer journeys and overall client satisfaction (measured by the Net Promoter Score, known as NPS®).

Dura Vermeer’s corporate aspiration is to become one of the Netherlands’ “top three highest performing and digitized construction companies by 2020.” This informs other company goals, such as:

1. Improved operational results (increased revenue and margin)

2. An enhanced proposition and expanded marketing (satisfied clients and a bigger sales pipeline)

3. A stronger organization (integrated, agile, and innovative)

4. Establishment of a solid innovation practice (focus on technologies and partnerships)

5. More digitization and breakthrough BIM technologies (data-driven, predictive, VR/AR, etc.)

 _{Integration of BIM 360 data with existing enterprise systems allowed the ability to report, sort, and review project information}

Addressing Internal Challenges

To successfully achieve its corporate goals and aspirations, Dura Vermeer first needed to address several key company-wide challenges. First, the customer faced difficulties in managing and connecting project information across the project lifecycle. Secondly, Dura Vermeer had no uniform way of working across regions and partners—leading to broken collaboration processes. Next, the company had some challenges to respond to market opportunities effectively and efficiently. When Dura Vermeer did win projects, its employees didn’t have the necessary digital competencies to meet client needs. Finally, they had a hard time scaling or sharing new innovations and best practices across the organization.

Seeking to overcome these challenges while moving forward towards their defined goals, Dura Vermeer decided to partner with Autodesk to seek, identify, and implement solutions.

Implementing Construction Project Management Solutions

To address the key challenges, Dura Vermeer combined the Autodesk BIM application set, Autodesk’s team, and its own in-house team of BIM experts. Collaborating as a united team on the BIM implementation, Dura Vermeer and Autodesk executed a unique program suited to Dura Vermeer’s needs.

First, the team set up a BIM execution plan with all the common project stakeholders that included the BIM Basic Information Delivery Manual (IDM), Dutch Revit Standard (when working with Revit), and collaboration with open standard format Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). They also set up a hosted BIM 360 environment for the partners to enable collaboration, coordination, and integrated workflows for design partners (architecture, structural, MEP), preferred partners, and suppliers and subcontractors.

Further, they developed a standardized 3D model information structure involving Revit templates and libraries. The team used BIM 360 Design to enable dislocated model collaboration, and educated employees in Autodesk BIM 360 Glue to enable model aggregation and coordination. Employees and partners were also educated in BIM 360 Field and the process, and BIM 360 Field was configured so all field issues are captured, registered, communicated with partners and resolved.

To govern BIM 360 adoption across the organization, the team set up a Key User structure, conducted knowledge sharing sessions, and provided project coaching. Autodesk also addressed and implemented critical fixes to IFC, which is crucial for supply chain communication.

Integration of BIM 360 data with enterprise systems allowed the ability to report, sort, and review project information. Using Business Intelligence tools, Dura Vermeer can draw correlations between financial project data, project members’ BIM skills, and 3D model management—all aimed at gathering information for re-use and avoiding risk on future projects.

BIM Transformation Leads to Increased Company Margins

The full BIM transformation resulted in positive project outcomes, including reduced design re-work and reduced failure costs across the project stages. By aligning people, process, standards, and Autodesk technology, Dura Vermeer experienced significant cost savings of approximately five percent per project. As a result, all projects will contribute to the increased company margin of three percent or more by 2020.

“It is important to start with the end in mind and understand the essence of a solid project information model to be able to use and re-use the digital information across the enterprise (cost avoidance and minimizing risk). Solid 3D information models are the answer. By implementing and using BIM 360, we have seen an enormous increase in information consistency and quality across the supply chain. Rework and cost of failure have been significantly reduced across all project stages.”

Gert-Jan Ditsel, BIM Manager, Dura Vermeer