Founded in 1973, Arpada is a Spanish general contractor that specializes in the building of residential, healthcare, and vertical construction projects across Spain and Mexico. The firm, part of Grupo Arpada, holds itself to the highest quality standards to meet its goal of being a trusted builder.
To offer their clients a wide range of competitive solutions and services, Arpada stays on the cutting-edge of technology to build more efficiently, sustainably, and safely. Arpada’s project portfolio consists of 25-30 projects a year, with an annual revenue of 120M€.
Arpada was using disconnected tools such as email, instant messaging, and spreadsheets with no traceability for issue management. The lack of a transparent digital process, and the inability to collaborate with project stakeholders was leading to loss of data, miscommunication, and overall inefficiencies.
In this workflow, Arpada’s safety manager would handwrite issue observations and take photos in the field during the snagging process. The safety manager would then enter the issues in an Excel spreadsheet in order to aggregate the information and send it to the field.
This process created a convoluted set of steps as the field also generated a report once all the issues were resolved. Taking into consideration that both project members had to create reports, at least 1.5 hours of work were lost each time a safety visit occurred.
“We rapidly identified that safety management onsite was cumbersome and needed to take multiple steps to manage issues on time,” says Cristina Calderón Gallo, Safety and Sustainability Director at Arpada.
To better connect the field to the office in order to increase communication and collaboration between different teams, Arpada decided to roll out BIM 360 as a common data environment to improve safety management on construction sites. Arpada’s goal was to digitize and streamline safety management onsite to achieve safer execution in the field, and enhance the production capacity of its technicians.
Leveraging their partnerships with the Autodesk extended Account and Construction Customer Success team, Cadlan, and Tech Data, Arpada created a training program for their BIM Champions in order to increase adoption. Through weekly virtual engagements, the team on-boarded BIM 360 to 25 different projects across Madrid.
“The main challenge to overcome was changing how our employees performed their work,” says Cristina Calderón Gallo. “By providing onsite training with close follow-ups and constant technical support, led by a change champion onsite, we were able to standardize the issue management process, streamline safety tracking, and increase adoption in the field.”
A gamification aspect also helped with the implementation of BIM 360 in the field. By creating an environment with friendly competitions, teams challenged themselves to resolve issues as quickly as possible. “A manager created the game, “killing-the-spotlights challenge” in relation to the yellow dots that represent open issues in the platform,” says Aitor Otero Olmos, Corporate BIM Manager at Arpada.
“This approach allowed the manager to resolve issues 75% faster, resulting in safer jobsites as fewer issues remained open at a time.”
In addition to the field, Arpada is looking to increase the adoption of BIM 360 across their subcontractors. To achieve this, the team has provided the required training and technical support. Their goal is to expand the adoption of BIM 360 across the supply chain to increase the number of external users within the next few months, to further standardize issue management and safety tracking across the industry.
Since the beginning, Arpada identified multiple benefits by using BIM 360 to digitize their workflows, which was a pivotal factor in consolidating its strategic position in the market. The main achievements in implementing a cloud solution include:
By implementing an issue management program for safety inspections, Arpada gained more than 100 hours per month and 3000€ per month in savings due to digitization of safety inspections across 25 projects.
The safety managers have also developed key performance indicators to detect Arpada’s improvement points. During safety inspections, safety onsite workers can resolve issues in real-time using mobile devices. This team is responsible for taking pictures and changing the incident status to resolved. With the new process in place, technicians address issues before the Safety manager is back in the office, leading to safer jobsites and generating a single closure report. The new way of issue tracking with the use of BIM 360 has reduced reporting time by 95%, since issue status is traceable in real-time.
“The digitalization of safety management through BIM 360 allows us to operate more quickly and comfortably in resolving safety issues,” says Aitor Otero Olmos. “This directly impacts the way we execute work-packages more safely, and consequently, improves the production capacity of our technicians.”
