Construction News

Fri March 29 2024

Related Information

iPads save Balfour Beatty $5m on airport job

18 May 12 Balfour Beatty Construction has reported savings of more than US$5m (£3.15m) by using the Egnyte file-sharing system and iPads on the reconstruction of Dallas Fort Worth Airport in the USA.

Balfour Beatty’s implementation of Egnyte’s HybridCloud file-sharing solution allowed the design team to save US$5.1m in costs and eliminating 4t of paper printing.

Egnyte is using the data from this and other construction industry customers to launch its construction Vertical Market Initiative (VMI), which is designed to meet construction industry needs for file access, sharing and storage.

Balfour Beatty project manager Jeff Pistor said that the scale of the project and security requirements on the Dallas Fort Worth Airport terminal reconstruction and improvement programme presented a challenge. “The drawing set was projected to be 20 times larger than our other large projects. Because of the complexity of the project, the number of subcontractors working on concurrent projects and the distance between the jobsite and the jobsite office, we needed a way to make the current drawings available to everyone electronically. We use Egnyte as the backend storage and iPads in the field as the display device, assuring us that everyone in the field has access to the most current drawings and greatly reducing the risk of a subcontractor working off the wrong plans.”

Related Information

Balfour Beatty initially selected Egnyte because of the security and control it gave in setting up and managing folders. Implementation of Egnyte’s Local Cloud (ELC) was critical because accessing the drawings from the cloud was hampered by a slow internet connection, the company found. Syncing a copy of the data behind the firewall and inside the network eliminated the need for more bandwidth to the internet and increase the access speed to drawings.

“Egnyte provides our partners at BARC (the joint venture on the project, which includes Balfour Beatty) the flexibility they need and the security we require,” said Perfecto Solis, vice president of airport development and engineering at DFW. “As part of our sustainability initiatives we continue to look for ways within our organization to go paperless and hope to use products like Egnyte for future projects.”

He added: “Because ELC access was managed at the jobsite, we were able to use it for collaboration with our design team. The team members working with large 3D models were housed in our office and were able to store and share their files on the ELC even though they were all on their own company machines and did not have logins to our network. Our network security was maintained and the team was able to accomplish their need to exchange information quickly.”

Got a story? Email news@theconstructionindex.co.uk

MPU
MPU

Click here to view latest construction news »