ITC Group is one of India’s largest corporate groups and foremost private sector companies, employing over 20,000 people across the country. Its businesses cover a range of industries from FMCG and Hospitality, to IT services and Agriculture.
The group’s Central Projects Organisation was tasked with delivering a new campus in an upcoming suburb of Kolkata, Rajarhat – a mixed-use project with IT and corporate offices, hotel, convention centre as well as residential towers.
Starting with the Rajarhat campus project, ITC has been able to digitally transform its construction management processes, closer connecting design and construction and enabling them to drive new efficiencies and streamline their processes.
Working at the scale of ITC, most consider technological adoption challenging. But the way in which they have integrated and expanded their construction solution stack shows that the opposite can be true.
Previously, ITC’s project teams had relied heavily on 2D design, manual processes and paper-driven or distributed electronic sharing of information and assets between its partners. This siloed system meant processes weren’t as efficient as they could be, leading to delays and disruptions from miscommunications and errors.
On top of the challenges presented by relying on 2D design and pre-construction drawings on AutoCAD, ITC’s biggest challenge was improving the visualisation of projects from the first step to the final product. Without this clear vision, they faced the regular risk of complications during construction and escalating costs driven by evolving changes and reworks by project stakeholders and consultants.
Collaboration was their next key challenge. Project information was scattered across various processes and people in the system, that when combined with a process that increased the chances of changes, meant they could regularly find themselves at risk of miscommunications and mistakes leading to costly delays.
What was needed was a centralised ecosystem that would help them better manage every step of the project process. Helping a large-scale firm like ITC make the move to cloud can prove challenging, but the transition was streamlined with the help of Autodesk India services and software partner 5D VDC Services LLP.
Initially, ITC looked to Autodesk’s products and 5D VDC’s expertise for the external landscape development modelling work for the ITC Rajarhat Campus. But having seen the benefits of integrating Autodesk into their workflows, ITC then moved to expand its use across the pre-construction design and planning of the entire project. Among the solutions used are BIM 360 Docs and Assemble. With efficient virtual construction modelling from the 5D VDC team, a view of the actual design as it would look after construction was now available in great detail, to help ITC avoid making any costly design errors.
“We could track exactly what was stuck where and resolve the issues with the person concerned instead of holding multiple meetings to figure the same. The centralised system also helped track and quantify even minor errors in drawings when they moved from one workflow to the other, and thus helped determine the quality of deliverables from engineering consultants.” –Krishan Saharan, Senior Project Manager, ITC Central Projects Organisation
The digitisation of ITC’s processes and better design workflow management have made a significant impact. Communication and collaboration across teams has been improved, saving valuable time and working to eliminate the errors they have previously been impacted by.
With the enhanced project visualisation, details that could never be captured before are now caught along the way. Avoiding conflicts of information and disruptive changes throughout the project lifecycle.
“This project has been like a proof of concept for other ITC projects and tracking of certain goals from this project will set the benchmarks for future projects.” –Raghu H Annaiah, Senior Design Manager (Structures), ITC Central Projects Organisation
The partnership between ITC, 5D VDC and Autodesk is now stronger than ever. Based on the success of the adoption of Autodesk solutions for the Rajarhat campus, ITC has since turned to 5D VDC for new projects to further harness the potential digitally transformed construction management. They are also looking to introduce new solutions to their stack, further enhancing their processes.
"With the numerous advantages from 3D modelling via BIM, there's no denying the positive impact it has on projects. Digitisation and better design workflow management have certainly helped to enable efficiencies in time and cross team collaboration. We look forward to working on more projects with Autodesk and ITC to further the adoption of the cloud in India's construction sector." –Pranav Parikh, Founder and CEO of 5D VDC Services LLP
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