Digitised Coordination of Construction Sites in the Cloud
Published on : Thursday 05-05-2022
Synchronising all the documents needed for a construction project on mobile end devices right at the construction site.
When plant constructors are coordinating projects at large construction sites, they must handle an enormous amount of paperwork in the form of plans, technical documentation or checklists. This paperwork is delivered to the construction site in containers before the actual construction work begins, and it remains there for the entire duration of the project. Whenever the team needs a certain document on site, they have to search for it in the container, keep it with them while they are working, make the necessary modifications either right away or later, and then store the modified document in the right place at the container. It is almost impossible to keep an overview and avoid mistakes this way.
The objective
The Siemens “Operating Company Gas and Power” division implements construction projects ranging from decentralised industrial facilities to large power plants.
In order to make the coordination of such projects at the construction sites easier, Siemens decided to introduce interactive and digital plant documentation.
The new system was required to synchronise all the documents needed for a construction project on mobile end devices right at the construction site. These documents were located in various Siemens-internal data sources.
In 2016, Fabasoft had developed the “Siemens Cloud Collaboration” to digitise project management processes on the basis of its standard product “Fabasoft Cloud”. Siemens now wanted functional extensions of the “Siemens Cloud Collaboration” to enable the traceable editing of documents right at the construction sites in a simple, quick and digital manner via tablets.
“Up to date – anywhere – anytime”
With the help of a mobile app, construction coordinators can now use their tablets to directly edit checklists, display plans and immediately make modifications, enter comments or modify the status of individual documents or tasks. The Fabasoft Cloud automatically synchronises the necessary data between the “Siemens Cloud Collaboration” and the tablet. All documents are continually available “offline” during work at the construction site which prevents project coordination from handling outdated versions of plans and also dramatically reduces the amount of paper.
“It is important for us that we can ‘redline’ large documents right at the construction site. The tonnes of paper documentation which we can avoid this way are contributing to efficiency and time savings. A ‘completeness check’ ensures that nothing is forgotten. This information is enormously valuable for us internally,” says Anke Kunze, Project Management, Operating Company Gas and Power/Energy Solutions about the significance of this solution to the success of the project.
Benefits of the Fabasoft Cloud
“Our migration to digital project data management and our complete elimination of paper coupled with a simple completeness check allowed us to obtain much higher quality in our projects and considerably reduced the effort of manual coordination required from our staff,” Kunze explains. The clearly designed user interface and easy operations of the Cloud solution ensure high user satisfaction. In the course of acceptance, for example, pictures of welding seams are taken with the tablet and are added directly to the documentation. Access to the right documents is made easy with the help of a tailor-made search function with terms and categories that have been predefined by Siemens.
The digital workflows for project coordination ensure that all processes are automatically adhered to. Deadlines can be added to individual tasks to support coordinated operations. The “Time travel” function guarantees full traceability and transparency: Every step of the project together with all modifications or releases can be viewed at any time for any point of time in the past.
Complete satisfaction
“Our first experience has shown that the amount of printed customer information is now much lower. We need less paper, and project data is distributed faster because it no longer needs to be printed and sent to the construction site but can instead be accessed on a mobile end device,” Kunze says.
For more than 135 years, Siemens has been standing for technical performance, innovation, quality, reliability and internationality. In an increasingly digitised world, the company is turning individual technical challenges into joint successes in trusting cooperation with customers and partners – from the optimisation of individual processes up to digital factories. Business activities are concentrating on electrification, automation and digitisation. This includes systems and services for the production, transmission and distribution of energy, energy-efficient products and solutions for production, transportation and building technology as well as technologies for high-quality and integrated health services. In these areas, automation technologies, software and data analytics play a large role.
Fabasoft is among the leading software product companies and cloud service providers in Europe for digital document management as well as electronic document, process, and records management. Numerous well-known private companies from industry and public sector organisations have relied on Fabasoft's quality and experience for more than three decades.
For more information see www.siemens.comFABASOFT
