AECOM is the world’s premier infrastructure firm, delivering professional services throughout the project lifecycle – from planning, design, and engineering to consulting and construction management. A Fortune 500 firm, AECOM partners with clients in the public and private sectors to solve their most complex challenges and build legacies for generations to come. On projects spanning transportation, buildings, water, governments, energy and the environment, AECOM is driven to deliver a better world.
From the Marlins Stadium in Miami to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, AECOM continues to land these projects for their construction and design-build approach, leading to optimized collaboration, productivity, and efficiency. Regardless of location, one thing remains the same: AECOM relies on Autodesk Construction Cloud™ to help them design and build the future of sports entertainment.
With BIM, the AECOM team cost-effectively builds the project twice — once virtually and the second time physically. Utilizing modeling in the design phase, they continually update with 3D, 4D, 5D, and 6D information that’s accessible across project stakeholders. AECOM envisions the virtual model as the predictable result of the physical facility through the eyes and collaboration of their BIM process. They call it the ‘BIM continuum.’ This method between design and construction connects the physical and the virtual so that neither is out of sync.
“BIM driven projects are strategically planned, allowing for optimized collaboration, productivity, scheduling, and profitability,” says Russ Dalton, America’s BIM Director at AECOM. “We’re continually optimizing our use of technology to bring geometric and cost certainty to the building process to ensure cost and time savings.”
Watch how AECOM uses Autodesk Construction Cloud to bring cost-effectively designed and built projects to every client they serve.
[Interview Transcript]
Russ Dalton, America’s BIM Director at AECOM: My job is to empower the teams to do two things, one, win new business, and two, be more proficient at executing that business.
Technology helps us in this arena by being able to give us predictable results. If you can dream it, then we can build it.
We've embraced BIM 360 as a company. Being a large design-build firm, BIM 360 allows us the capability of using it on small projects and scalable up to very large ones. Our first step in our adoption of technology was to get geometric certainty, does form fit function. We moved into cost certainty, which is phase 2, and with BIM 360, with the cost module, that gets us to the second point. Because of our level of BIM that we generate in design and construction, that gets us to the third phase, which is operational certainty. So, if we can move into an arena where we're actually telling the client how much it's going to cost to operate that facility, then that'll set us apart. Because for every dollar consumed in design and construction, there's $8 spent in operations.
One of the projects that we finished early and had great results on was the Barclays Center Arena. Because of the technology that we used on that project, everything was done during the design process. We looked at it through predictable lenses to make sure that in the construction process it could be completed with geometric certainty and cost certainty. And towards that end, we had five issues in the field and most projects you have eight to 9% of $450 million on this project, it was $4.5 million in cost savings.
Data has led to more predictable outcomes across our projects in the event that it's live, and that's a big key differentiator. Cloud technology keeps us moving forward. We've witnessed a 32% increase in productivity with this methodology.
BIM 360 gives us geometric and cost certainty to finish projects on time and under budget is a win-win.
