Cold hard facts on collaborative savings
Most people talk about the cost savings and efficiencies that collaborative systems can provide, but cold hard facts are often hard to come by.
We have just completed a case study with Saudi Oger in Abu Dhabi. Saudi Oger is one of the leading construction and property development companies in the Middle East and used Aconex on the Sowwah Square development - also known as the Abu Dhabi Financial Centre.
The project team used Aconex for document control and also used the workflows module and the online viewer for document and shop drawing reviews. Following this, they stated that they saved $550k in print costs, and (thanks to Workflows) improved their document review cycles by 20%. The project managed over 1.3 million documents and over 500,000 correspondence items, so the volumes were quite large (although still an order of magnitude smaller than some of our larger projects).
Gerard Couturier (the A&E Division Director) said, "Workflows significantly accelerated and improved the quality of the process. When using hard copies and an FTP site, a 10-day review process often turned into 12 days due to the administrative work required. With Aconex 10 days actually meant 10 days."
This finding is not news to some. As I have heard someone in the industry say recently - "People do not question whether they need a tower crane on a project or not - they intuitively know that they will save money compared to carrying bricks up the stairs on their backs. Now, people are starting to realize the same thing about collaborative systems. Compared to in-house systems or hard copy, they know it will save them real money." Amen.
