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At an in-person London event, UK-based collaboration technology Revizto gave insights on efficiently implementing technologies.
Today, Extranet Evolution is at the Institution of Civil Engineers in London, attending a briefing to learn more about Revizto, an integrated collaboration platform for architecture, engineering and construction.
According to a nearby banner stand, Revizto provides a “single source of communication for all disciplines, all stakeholders, from any location and any device”. The ‘Revizto unplugged’ event aims to give a global view of the UK-based company’s technology delivery, with contributions from Australasia, Europe and the Americas. It has included some good pointers for effective implementation of new technologies.
Revizto and ROI
The first presentation came from Australasia, from Jason Howden, talking about achieving a return on investment (ROI) from Revizto, bridging the gap between designers, constructors and owner-operators. Howden’s background includes working in New Zealand for a design firm, Warren & Mahoney, learning from working on site next to contractors, and working on projects small and large. Revizto is being deployed on anything from small residential projects (where the risk to homeowners are high, and personal costs cut deep), to large commercial schemes (where it is important to manage the budget and programme – “you can’t manage what you don’t measure”).
From a business perspective, he said “Business leaders want innovation, but don’t want innovation … Small errors in design can be very expensive in construction … when it goes wrong, you want protection – and documentation is king when it becomes legal”. In terms of ROI benefits, Revizto helped reduce his firm’s insurance premiums, and – in terms of manpower savings – it also reduced reliance on manual document processes while enriching people’s working lives.
His firm piloted Revizto on a pilot BIM project, looking to adopt clean thinking untainted by existing processes. They kept it simple and focused on objectives that were meaningful to the company’s leadership, and Howden showed the ROI from implementing the technology, lowering the baseline costs. “Did it work – yes. Was it easy – no.”
US site use of Revizto
Shaun Hester talked about implementation of Revizto on-site in the US. From personal experiences (in Wisconsin, among other places), he highlighted the importance of working with operational champions on site, setting user expectations on areas that were important to the site team, training on areas that were immediately valuable, and then retraining when needed. And adoption was driven on site – “go to where the work is being done” in the field, he said, “and be repetitive and diligent”. The key to adoption is proper setup along with specific onboarding concepts, making the user experience easy, with as few clicks as possible. “Success can be as simple as using the model the understand the upcoming work being installed. Don’t make it complicated. … Be patient … Set expectations and start small“.
Revizto and infrastructure
Emphasising that Revizto can be used extensively on civil engineering projects as well as buildings, New Zealand-based English ex-pat Chris Mawson (APAC customer service director) explained Revizto is being used on a lot of infrastructure megaprojects across every state in Australia, as well as road, rail and ports projects in New Zealand ($100s of billions-worth). Examples include: the Cross River Rail project in Brisbane, Queensland (420 users); SSTOM – a railway project in Sydney (1100 users in just six months); the Goal Coast Light Rail project in Queensland (592 users, with 78,000 drawings); Melbourne’s level crossing removal project* (719 users); and, in New Zealand, O Mahurangi Penlink (265 users). Mawson talked in some detail about KiwiRail where Revizto was being used on 55 projects, with 570 users, accessing 75,000 drawings, and then about customer’s McConnell Dowell use of the platform.
The event finished with some workshop sessions designed to get industry feedback on Revizto’s future product roadmap which envisages two major releases per annum. It was interesting to hear the practical needs of industry articulated, plus some discussion of the favourite buzzword of the moment: AI.
[* Projects from the Melbourne level crossings programme featured in the Bentley Systems Year in Infrastructure and Going Digital Awards in 2022 and among the 2023 finalists. EE will be at the YII event in Singapore on 10-12 October 2023.]
