Yondr Group leverages BIMLauncher to enable live collaboration across platforms and teams

 
 

Yondr Group is a global developer, owner operator and service provider of data centres who delivers complex data centre capacity needs for the world’s largest technology companies.



Project brief

To support their ambitious business growth plans, Yondr Group (Yondr) chose Procore as their preferred reliable client platform. 

Because their contractors brought Aconex to the project, the separate teams needed to overcome the issue of using Aconex and Procore simultaneously to collaborate. This typically requires more resources and manual workflows, double-entry, room for error, all while increasing risk and decreasing productivity.

BIMLauncher allowed Yondr and their contracting teams to overcome the challenges of using Procore and Aconex together on a project with innovative automation solutions, enabling teams to work collaboratively in real-time while each used their platform of choice. 

The challenge

Yondr partnered with an industry leading consultancy to develop systems, procedures and processes to underpin Yondr and its partners ambitious project delivery plans. 

With its innovative information management policies and a world class delivery platform, Procore was chosen for its features that support project controls, reporting, safety, quality, commissioning data, and scheduling. and more.

A contractor was then appointed under a Design-build contract, bringing within them their own instance of Aconex, their preferred platform for collaboration and approval processes.

To maximise value for Yondr’s investment in technology,  they needed to carefully consider how delivery teams would collaborate while using different systems (contractor-owned Aconex and Yondr-owned Procore).

While data from the design team would originate in Aconex, it needed to be transferred to Procore for site team access.

Prioritising information management

Information shared from Aconex to Procore needed to be in line with Yondr’s project delivery team and information management requirements, maintaining document integrity, version and revision updates and history, with maximised compatibility by overcoming and translating any differences between platforms.

Design information should be accessible to Procore users, as follows: 

  • Documents must be approved by the design team before reaching the site team

  • Drawings with a new revision up for approval should have site team access removed

  • Documents should be made available in the correct corresponding tool within Procore

    • Drawings are moved to the appropriate drawing set in the Procore Drawing tool for access by the site team

    • Specifications are moved to the Specifications tool

    • Other documents are moved to the Documents tools, sorted by an organisation-wide standard folder structure 

  • All document attributes in Procore should be as per the document in Aconex


The decision to automate

Maintaining both systems in line with information management protocols would require the document controller to manually monitor Aconex and regularly add, update, and check for errors between systems. 

This “old fashioned” (manual) method is costly in terms of project resources, and is considered a document control nightmare to be avoided. Some of the risks associated with the manual information management that negatively impact a project include:

  • Inconsistent metadata mapping between systems affecting reporting and increasing difficulty to find information

  • Versions and revisions not published to Procore, making only partial history available, adversely affecting a team’s ability to make decisions

  • Incorrect information in Procore, causing site teams to lose trust in the platform and return to paper-based methods

  • Bottleneck of document control tasks creating publishing delays from Aconex to Procore, resulting in site teams accessing outdated information

  • Mistakes in tracking manual tasks between revisions

  • Risk of incorrect information published, potentially exposing sensitive documents

  • An inconceivable metadata transfer process, resulting in a sacrifice of information quality


BIMLauncher’s automated solution

BIMLauncher offers a service-based solution for the project lifecycle that delivers on information management requirements automatically.

BIMLauncher’s professional services team worked with Yondr and their contractor to align the information management plan with both systems. By leveraging their in-depth understanding of both systems and information management Yondr was able to use BIMLauncher to ensure that all of the information management requirements were automated between both systems, maximising collaboration between design teams working in Aconex, with client and site teams working in Procore. Notably, no additional document control work was required and site teams could rely on the information in Procore – as the correct data was always available in the right place at the right time, without errors. 

Results

BIMLauncher enabled both teams to overcome unforeseen challenges associated with using multiple systems on a live project, while inconsistencies related to information requirements were resolved in a timely manner.


BIMLauncher has given us an easy way to streamline communication between teams working in different systems. The ability to quickly and easily set up these processes across our project portfolio has resulted in an immediate improvement in the quality of our projects, our team’s efficiency and overall speed of delivery.” 

—  Michelle Ianniello, Lead Document Controller, Yondr Group

Freedom of choice
Project teams leveraged best of breed systems together,  enabling true collaboration in a distributed system environment.

Automation reduces risk and saves time
Automating with BIMLauncher returned an outstanding cost/benefit compared to the manual alternative, reducing the dependency on document control resources and reducing project risk. 

Maximising Yondr’s technology investments
As a standard component of Yondr’s systems, BIMLauncher continues to enable the company to maximise their investment in Procore and to support its rapid and evolving portfolio of projects.