Founded in 1957, Sabbour Consulting is one of the region’s leading multidisciplinary engineering consulting firms, delivering large-scale residential, commercial, hospitality, and institutional developments across Egypt and internationally.
As the firm’s portfolio expanded and projects involved more stakeholders, traditional methods for managing and sharing project information began to limit efficiency, transparency, and speed. To support continued growth while maintaining its standards for project delivery, Sabbour set out to modernize how teams collaborate and manage information.
— Omar Hussien Sabbour, CEO, Sabbour Consulting
As projects became larger and more complex, coordinating across disciplines became increasingly challenging. Architecture, structural, and MEP teams needed to exchange large volumes of information while staying aligned on changes, reviews, and approvals.
Traditional workflows became a growing bottleneck. Teams faced slow file transfers, duplicate document versions, limited visibility into approvals, and additional effort to confirm that everyone was working from the latest information.
These challenges were especially apparent on multidisciplinary projects requiring continuous coordination. Without a centralized environment for project information, teams faced a greater risk of rework and delayed approvals, while project leaders had less visibility into progress and outstanding decisions.
For Sabbour, addressing these challenges was about more than improving individual workflows. The firm needed a more connected and scalable approach that could support increasingly complex projects and distributed teams.
Sabbour’s Digital Delivery Manager, Osama Younis, led the initiative with a clear objective: improve transparency, streamline workflows, and establish a more connected way of working across the firm.
As collaboration demands increased across projects and departments, Sabbour accelerated its digital transformation strategy, extending connected workflows across both external and internal processes.
“The biggest challenge wasn’t the technology—it was helping teams adopt a new way of working,” says Osama Younis, BIM Manager, Sabbour Consulting. “With Autodesk Docs, we showed that a centralized platform could improve collaboration, eliminate version uncertainty, and give teams more confidence in the information they rely on every day.”
The rollout began with BIM-based coordination workflows, where timely access to accurate project information was particularly critical. From there, the approach quickly expanded to additional teams.
Using Autodesk Docs together with Desktop Connector and secure cloud-based access, engineers and designers could collaborate in real time, access the latest project information without delays, and work from a single source of truth.
Centralizing project information also helped Sabbour standardize workflows across distributed teams and projects. Rather than relying on individual file exchanges and manual follow-up, teams could access a shared project record and gain greater visibility into the information needed to move work forward.
The shift created the foundation for a more consistent approach to project delivery—one that could be applied across disciplines and scaled as Sabbour’s project portfolio continued to grow.
One of the first major initiatives to demonstrate the impact of this approach was the Arab Open University (AOU) campus project in Egypt.
The development required close coordination between architecture, structural, and MEP teams. Previously, coordination relied heavily on file exchanges, manual follow-up, and lengthy approval processes. With multiple disciplines contributing information throughout the project, keeping everyone aligned required significant time and effort and increased the risk of rework.
With Autodesk Docs in place, stakeholders could work from a centralized project record, giving teams more consistent access to current project information and making it easier to coordinate changes across disciplines.
The impact was measurable:
Review and approval cycles were reduced by 30–40%.
Project teams recovered more than 20 hours per week, which could be redirected toward higher-value design and delivery work.
Teams gained greater confidence that disciplines were coordinating around the latest project information.
According to JLL, Project Manager for Arab Open University, “On the Arab Open University project, Autodesk Docs transformed the way we worked. Teams were aligned around the latest information, and collaboration between disciplines became significantly more efficient.”
The AOU project demonstrated how a centralized approach could reduce the administrative effort involved in coordination while allowing teams to spend more time focused on design and delivery. It also provided Sabbour with a practical model that could be applied to other multidisciplinary projects.
The benefits Sabbour experienced extended beyond the AOU project. As connected workflows were adopted more broadly, teams saw improvements in coordination, information management, and visibility across project delivery.
“There are significant advantages to using Autodesk Docs,” says Sylvia Eskandar, Technical Team Leader, Sabbour Consulting. “Real-time collaboration, global accessibility across time zones, and faster workflows between teams have improved the way we deliver projects.”
Across teams, Sabbour achieved measurable improvements:
Design rework was reduced by up to 30%.
Accountability improved through version control and access tracking.
Data security was strengthened while maintaining accessibility for distributed teams.
These improvements were particularly valuable for teams working across locations and time zones. Easier access to current information reduced the need for manual exchanges and helped disciplines move work forward without waiting for files to be transferred or verified.
The benefits also extended to clients and external stakeholders. Greater visibility into project progress helped accelerate approvals and gave stakeholders more confidence that teams were making decisions based on the latest information.
For Sabbour, the result was not simply faster coordination. The firm gained a more transparent and consistent approach to managing project information, helping teams reduce avoidable rework while maintaining greater control over project delivery.
Building on these results, Sabbour Consulting is expanding these workflows across disciplines and project types to support more consistent collaboration and information management firm-wide.
What began with BIM coordination has evolved into a broader delivery model. By standardizing how teams access, share, and manage information, Sabbour is creating a foundation that can support both increasingly complex projects and continued business growth.
The firm also plans to integrate additional capabilities from Autodesk Construction Cloud, including AI-powered tools to support automation, surface insights, and help teams make more informed decisions.
The focus is on building a connected delivery model that can evolve with the business—giving teams the information and visibility they need while creating greater consistency across projects.
This connected approach is helping Sabbour improve project delivery, strengthen collaboration across teams, and scale operations more efficiently.
— Osama Younis, BIM Manager, Sabbour Consulting
