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Issue Date: October 2003

Global AEC projects minus the jetlag

1 October 2003

Today's business realities are demanding that more and more AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) projects operate globally. Exacting specifications call for top talent in all corners of the world to merge with local management. The sheer magnitude of large projects demands that managers recruit and engage a global pool of resources. And compressed schedules require a distributed team that can 'follow the sun' and work 24x7 to meet deadlines.
Fine, but what about the jetlag? What about the fact that the people are now dispersed over a constellation of companies and time zones? How does one successfully merge, synchronise and unite the project information and thousands of decisions that occur everyday? And how can one battle the technology sprawl: of AEC software tools that so often develop around these global projects and that impede rather than improve global efficiencies?
"A managed AEC IT environment can mitigate, even eliminate, this jetlag," says Tex van Deventer, MD of Bentley Systems SA. "A coordinated, managed environment unites global projects allowing tools to connect to each other. AEC information can be confidently shared, synchronised, and secured. But most important of all, people, regardless of location or discipline, can have the right information to make the best decision for their task.
Van Deventer continues, "Bentley's contribution to this managed environment comes in what is termed a 'federated' approach - whereby our software serves as a 'unifying platform' for regional AEC IT systems. The result is a standard global system, incorporating local working systems, that provides project-wide functionality such as access control, change management, and global querying.
"To a great extent, the whole point of global projects is to inject massive parallelism into projects. The bad news is that parallelism imposes two new demands on the coordination of information - more people must simultaneously share information, and the information is constantly changing. A managed environment successfully coordinates this double churn, eliminates the lag, and enables massive parallelism."
"The same is true with re-use of knowledge," he elaborates. "On the one hand, AEC executives stepping off planes are excited by knowledge breakthroughs of local teams. On the other, they are frustrated that these breakthroughs are bottled-up locally and not shared with global teams for constant re-use. Once a managed environment is in place, it becomes natural to re-use and leverage knowledge and information.
Concludes van Deventer, "As one CEO of a large AEC firm put it, "30% of our work we have done before." A managed environment eliminates the knowledge lag and allows global teams to re-use rather than redo."
For more information contact Bentley Systems, 011 462 5811, or see www.bentley.com


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