Sean O’Dwyer
If you’re actively competing in the construction sector and not using the cloud – more particularly, the Autodesk Construction Cloud – the chances are you need to contend with quite a few more challenges than those who are.
You’re probably accustomed to working around the challenges.
After all, what’s the worst that can happen?
Like the weather, Cloud Computing is everywhere. Unlike the weather, it’s not temperamental. It’s constant. It’s an independent extension to just about every core activity your company undertakes; reliable in the extreme. If your systems crash, the cloud doesn’t. If your servers fill up, the cloud doesn’t.
If you lose track of file versions, or find too often that you have to keep toggling between different software for different tasks, or find it difficult to send hefty files, or spend time searching sources for the right information at the right time, the cloud doesn’t. Which, if you’re in it, means you don’t.
In short, as Rudyard Kipling wrote: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you”, that’s good. Because you probably have to.
In my last blog, I talked about the label ‘Connected Construction’ that Autodesk uses to describe the Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC). Just a reminder, that if you’re already working with Autodesk’s Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Collection (AEC Collection) then the ACC is there for you to discover.
It’s well worth taking a look at the ACC to get some real insight into what you can gain from the benefits it can offer you as a unified platform, in terms of team connectedness, enhanced collaboration; linking between contractors and specialists via a single version of the truth, reliable every time.
The logic you’ll find when you click on the link is compelling, but the fact remains that many companies still get by with a whole range of approaches and software, systems and procedures that they feel have stood the test of time.
There’s what I believe to be the key to what causes a lot of problems that companies experience – the deployment of a ‘whole range’ of solutions with the implicit implication that not everything is in the same place, at the same time, in the same way.
Often in my discussions with Symetri customers, and those considering availing themselves of our services, a certain lack of awareness of the true nature of some of the more common inefficiencies comes to light. The ‘quirks’ of traditional approaches are often assimilated into the daily run of things because that is how they have always been done.
These are often companies with major projects in their portfolio and underway, prestigious client lists, and leading specialists on their teams. The company profiles are impressive, their client testimonials are glowing, and their websites have clearly been created by professionals. Many of their internal systems have been too; but just not by one team of professionals implementing integrated systems at the same time. The result of that is usually a piecemeal (or disconnected) approach, rather than a strategically mapped-out holistic approach.
Task overload has a habit of creeping up on you and often comes from the lack of having a single unified system. It shows itself as people having to do too much in the way of peripheral work just to keep the main project activity on tasks.
‘Peripheral work’ is all about checking, verifying, chasing, contacting, revisiting; the multiple time-wasting tasks that take up time and effort and, even then, do not always create certainty – Is this the current version? Was ‘X’ the last to make changes? Has the engineer seen it yet? Things like that, of which there are dozens, often every time you open a file.
These problems are caused and confounded by, having information siloes in the business, combined with individual approaches about the most expedient way to get things done.
Customers have told me about losing files, for example. When tracking down the cause it becomes obvious that the file was created in Excel; isolated (or siloed) from any central system. There have been cases of different project participants using different platforms for viewing files, sometimes with no access control.
Control is an interesting point. It’s not uncommon for individual users to store their current version on USB sticks, believing that they control what’s what that way, and that they’ll always be sure the up-to-date information is all there. The thing is, other people can quite easily be working on a different file at the same time believing that they, too, have control.
These are just examples of how so much can go wrong in so little time. It can come right in the end, but the problem is the end becomes so much further away than it ever needs to have been. As end-to-end processes get distorted into end-to-and-fro-end, make-do, processes, every slippage chews up time and erodes profitability.
With potentially multiple versions of the truth running concurrently it is little surprise that delays lead to recriminations, and not just internally.
Clients expect excellence, diligence, and the deployment of optimum solutions
that rule out confusion and deliver certainty – against timelines, budgets, and expectations.
When the worst that can happen does happen, it doesn’t always show itself as one giant gaff. It gets absorbed. It gets worked round. Now the worst thing of all happens; it gets forgotten because the next project is pressing, the next priority has nudged remedial action off the to-do list. Life goes on.
The change brought to many companies turning to the cloud is all wrapped up in that word ‘unified’. Everything coming together; a single, digital place where tasks are automated, data is centralised (and secure, by the way – ACC services for Ireland are hosted at the Amazon Web Services [AWS] datacentre in Dublin and you can take a look at their rigorous approach to data security here) and data storage is assured.
This point about certainty of data storage is an interesting one. Knowing that you won’t run into any issues about server overload is reassuring because when it happens, backups start to fail, automated tasks are jeopardised, projects run into difficulties.
Life goes on so much more smoothly when control is centralised and everybody really does know the same as everybody else at the same time. Files can always be relied on to be the current version. People can collaborate in real-time. Times is not wasted, it’s managed. Clients are reassured, every day, on every aspect of the project. No recriminations. No siloes. No confusion. Just the best outcome for everybody.
The Autodesk Construction Cloud drives efficient practices by making it actually impossible to do anything inefficiently. I’d suggest you take a look round your office, and ponder those control issues I mentioned, consider any manual processes you have in operation, ask if any of the problems I’ve outlined strike a note of familiarity. Symetri can you with that if needed.
If you want to know more about the power of the cloud advantage in today’s digital world, please get in touch.
