KEO International is a leader in planning, design, engineering, and project management solutions. Their projects across 11 international markets represent a leading-edge aesthetic combined with meaningful and practical design and constructability. Their design excellence, high standards, and delivery quality has led to their involvement in many of the world’s most ambitious and iconic projects over the past 50 years.
KEO’s design excellence and creative vision complements their innovative use of cutting edge technologies to improve and optimise workflow efficiencies. As their core technology, they use BIM 360 within Autodesk Construction Cloud™ to improve design and increase structural value across remote teams. Here’s how.
KEO’s projects include the four-million-square-foot Aykon City Towers complex at the heart of Dubai, and Kuwait’s Business Town Tower in the center of Kuwait City’s Financial District. Their teams are responsible for designing and implementing cutting edge projects amid major cities and involve intensely complex logistics.
In a pre-digitized construction environment, these logistics would be extremely labor-intensive and costly. This includes working across a spectrum of highly varied environments, each requiring unique structural and aesthetic solutions. It also involves an enormous number of stakeholders, each with individual interests, needs, and demands.
Sharing information and collaborating in this environment can be complicated, and has the potential to lead to significant cost and timeline overruns, as well as potential quality issues. With stakeholders dispersed across multiple locations, KEO’s digital strategy is centered around using cloud-based tools to design, plan, and construct. With BIM 360 as a common data environment, KEO ensures consistent communication around complex design and constructability issues to deliver consistent products.
“Over the last few years, KEO’s IT Digital Strategy pivoted towards a simple goal – empower our digital worker to be able to securely and effectively collaborate and communicate anytime, anywhere, on any device, within or outside the KEO organisational boundaries,” says Damir Jaksic, Chief Information Officer at KEO International Consultants. “The seamless integration of BIM 360 across multiple tools saves time and enables better communication, accuracy, and efficiency.”
“BIM 360 has been especially important, providing a unified platform that promotes integrated, collaborative workflows between architecture, engineering, and construction teams,” says Jaksic. “BIM 360 has allowed us to better collaborate and securely share data with external stakeholders, saving us more than 90% of the time it would normally take to do so in other disconnected platforms.”
BIM 360 is the thread that holds all contributions together, helping all stakeholders speak a common language. On projects the size of KEO’s, the amount of data and files is enormous. Despite that, with BIM 360 users can find the latest version of any design model or drawing very quickly.
“Finding the required information, such as the right files, models, and drawings, has become more efficient,” says Juan Tena Florez, Regional Digital Design Manager, KEO International Consultants. “We’ve calculated an improvement of about 83% in terms of time savings, in that regard.”
BIM 360 also improves productivity by automating mundane tasks and providing a platform for collaboration. Its AI-driven mitigation and other productivity functions help the KEO team to apply their creativity with greater impact.
In addition to time and productivity gains, using BIM 360 improves quality as well.
“With information at our fingertips,” says Jaksic, “we use automated workflows to validate quality, and once that is done, it is transmitted to third parties. The whole process is workflow-driven and automated. We also oversee this process on a project or company-wide level.”
KEO uses Autodesk Construction Cloud and Autodesk’s AEC Collection across the project lifecycle, from design to operations. For instance, BIM technology played a vital role in connecting the different design and construction environments on the Aykon City Towers project.
“This helped bolster group interaction while refining complex workflows into a structured, just-in-time chain of responsibility and delivery,” says Florez.
Autodesk Revit is KEO’s stock-in-trade tool, improving both the design process and constructability. Every intelligent model created with Revit represents a complete project, conveniently stored in a single database file. This allows changes made in one part of the model to be automatically propagated to other parts of the model, dramatically enhancing workflows.
KEO also uses Autodesk Navisworks to manage inter-team and inter-department collaboration. Additionally, AutoCAD supports, and supplements blueprint envisioning and production.
BIM 360 is critical for providing a unified common data platform that promotes integrated, collaborative workflows between architecture, engineering, and construction teams.
KEO International’s commitment to intelligent innovation means it is continually looking forward to the next project and the next generation of technology and process to support its projects.
For companies that want to embrace forward-thinking technology and improve their ability to work remotely, Jaksic offers some advice:
“Focus on a task that can provide significant outcomes in a year. Then, in turn, focus on the one process that matters the most, the one most essential to delivery of your customer value proposition. Do it right, and then repeat it. While you’re at it, champion inclusivity and collaboration. Micro-organizations within organizations create new intellectual properties that can then open up new favorable strategic options.”
Autodesk’s portfolio of products will continue to form a core part of KEO’s strategy and approach, to connect, convey, and simplify the way they approach overall project planning, as they take on new projects with massive logistical challenges.
The extreme design complexity and multi-layered delivery protocols that KEO’s flagship projects demand are possible only with an elegant and layered approach, including effective technology. The challenge for the future is to maintain and increase delivery levels while consuming fewer materials.
With Autodesk as a partner, KEO International is up to the task.
