GHD is a leading professional services firm with more than 200 offices across five continents. The organization adopted ProjectWise in 2009 but has since seen significant growth across all world regions. Support teams now initiate nearly 20 ProjectWise projects a week, most involving customizations, and provide daily support for more than 1,400 users. With over 10,000 employees having to use the platform, GHD realized that it needed enterprise automation to create a connected data environment for every project while implementing cloud-based data sources. Requiring a more sustainable support model, GHD has worked closely with Bentley to create a new framework for enterprise-wide information management using ProjectWise.
GHD created a new framework that adopts standards for a project-centric connected data environment. The team was able to create user interfaces to revolutionize setup, functionality creation, maintenance, and user management. The environment allowed GHD to enable consistent and repeatable project setup, with repetition in structure, consistent workflows, and a structured data schema with a common vocabulary. The functionality of the applications provided an innovative solution that had never been achieved in the organization.
Outcome
By implementing this new ProjectWise framework, GHD saw more projects adopting a connected data environment, leading to enhanced collaboration and improved productivity—even on smaller projects where the cost had been thought to be too expensive and the process too complicated. This new system has shortened startup time by more than 200% and reduced support time by up to 20 hours per project. By having a common set of workflows across the entire organization, GHD saw a decrease in mistakes and time spent looking for materials. With 1,800 people working on 10 projects a year spending an average of an hour learning variations in project structure, GHD expects to save 18,000 hours annually by eliminating that process. The organization also expects that delivery quality will improve while time spent addressing issues will reduce by 30%. Caching server management time has also been cut by 900 hours per year, which led to a 400% return on investment.
Software
As the basis for GHD’s new framework, ProjectWise is now recognized as the global benchmark for managing engineering, architecture, and construction project content at GHD. The organization has globally adopted the platform to support projects of all types and sizes. By leveraging the extensive library of ProjectWise features and capabilities, all team members have improved visualization of user interfaces, providing support teams with enterprise-level insights and performance metrics.
“The power of the ProjectWise platform is recognized as the global benchmark for the management of AEC-based content. GHD’s vision was to extend that potential into a global option context to support significantly wider ranges of project types, sizes, and supported applications.”