Integrating a 500-plus-member design team

Written by Bentley Systems
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Bentley’s ProjectWise document management system allowed the Fluor/HDR design team and its 38 external teaming partners on the Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD) Eagle P3 commuter rail project to work as a single entity, saving about $3 million and enabling on-time project delivery.

RTD’s FasTracks involves construction and operation of 122 miles of new commuter and light rail, 18 miles of bus rapid transit service, 21,000 parking spaces, and enhanced bus and rail connections. RTD selected Denver Transit Partners (DTP) to construct and operate the $2.1 billion Eagle P3 commuter rail project, a key part of this initiative. As the design lead for DTP, Fluor/HDR Global Design Consultants (Fluor/HDR) had to assemble a design team of 210 professionals, plus 300 supporting auxiliary team members, across 77 locations worldwide. Once integrated, this design team would need to take conceptual design to completion on an aggressive 15-month schedule.

To facilitate rapid project execution, Fluor/HDR needed a document management system that would allow real-time collaboration and work-sharing among its distributed project team. Bentley ProjectWise was selected as the document management system. This would allow all 77 design locations to access design documents and have a framework for real-time collaboration that supports work sharing; this would be key to successfully completing such a large project on an aggressive schedule.

Despite an aggressive 15-month design schedule and a project team residing in multiple locations, Fluor/HDR met its deadline. Using ProjectWise, Fluor/HDR increased productivity, improved quality, and overcame human and technical challenges associated with integrating a seamless design team. It cut costs by reducing the need for travel and extra office space, and saved hundreds of CAD management hours by deploying and updating the project’s MicroStation Workspace to one central location contained within ProjectWise. Better quality design was achieved by enforcing a consistent presentation and format of all design files to minimize inconsistencies between teaming partners.

Fluor/HDR used ProjectWise to connect all 77 remote office locations and allow its design team and 38 external teaming partners to work as a single entity. ProjectWise was used as the project document management system for more than 230,700 files, which included not only CAD files but also engineering calculations, spreadsheets, Word documents, QA/QC review submittals, and email correspondence. The ProjectWise configuration at the Denver Fluor/HDR Eagle P3 design office included a ProjectWise integration server, index server for thumbnails, text extraction and search, and a web server for external access.

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