How Arcadis Enhanced Communication, Efficiency with Bluebeam

Many Projects, One System

As the digital lead within Arcadis, Steven Coyle said, “I’m accountable for ensuring our projects are delivered efficiently by reducing our risk using digital technologies, enabling our business, using design automation, computational design and other processes, and scaling that globally and encouraging our people to be learning new skills and develop.” Coyle also works on an array of projects, through every business lines within Australia.

“Our digital strategy is built around standardisation, automation and data centricity,” Coyle said. “So by using the capabilities of Bluebeam Revu such as Studio Sessions we’ve established a centralised way of managing all our comments, reviews and also having a standardised approach to our markup, a quality control process.”

The broader the scope of work, the more important it is to have a place where all your diverse efforts can come together. Using Bluebeam’s many functions allows the teams Coyle and his peers bring their many operations under one big tent for more meaningful and effective collaboration.

Communication Comes First

Arcadis’ Associate Technical Director of digital engineering for New South Wales Civil Infrastructure business, Australia, Sergio Fuentes said that these organisational capacities are critical to the firm’s ability to communicate effectively.

“There were two things that prompted Arcadis to use Bluebeam,” he said. “One of them was coordination and collaboration. Considering the size of our projects, the complexity of them and the number of stakeholders that we have, we needed to find an effective way to communicate, and Bluebeam provided that.”

The other thing? “Accuracy and precision,” Fuentes said. He said that Bluebeam was a key piece of software to establish accountability. “Having people like Steven and Angeline (Kisses) Montes as our Bluebeam software champion, it’s really helped to disseminate that information to people like myself, and allowed them to develop best practice procedures and SOPs as well, which we can use to standardise across all of our projects,“ Fuentes said.

Simplifying Collaboration

As the Principal CAD Technician and the subject matter expert for Bluebeam on the team, BIM Manager Mark Javillo was happy to share how critical Bluebeam has been for Arcadis, and his own work forecasting workloads for the entire team.

“Bluebeam improves collaboration by allowing both drafters and engineers to access the same document with the same version in real time, which reduces miscommunication and ensures project update consistency,” he said.

The software has simplified his life and workflow in many ways. “Before the introduction of Bluebeam, basically everything was done manually,” Javillo said, which was especially complicated with Arcadis’ multinational team of employees, adding wait times and unnecessary waste. “It was really important that we centralise that information,” Javillo said. “We work in environments where we have hot desks, so we don’t have things we’re carrying around with us anymore.”

Kisses Montes, the Principal Structural CAD technician in Arcadis’ Manila office, says that Bluebeam has improved her processes as she works on forecasting the workloads for the team. “Before the introduction of Bluebeam, basically everything was done manually,” said Montes. “When designers in Manila were working with our counterparts in Australia, they’d do their markups, and send it back to us, with people printing up drawings, reports, marking them up and scanning. The problem is, you’d be putting this information in multiple locations—and all of this has a carbon footprint. So it was really important that we centralise this information. We’ve eliminated paper trail.”

“Bluebeam has really allowed that big collaboration piece for all of our teams to come together,” Javillo said, adding that the software had caused significant changes to communication and collaboration across teams. Angeline Montes explains “With Bluebeam, the design review process was reduced from minimum two days waiting to incorporation of markups real time’.

The feedback for his efforts has been overwhelmingly positive. “We now have a global quality manager who’s actually knocking on our door saying, ‘Hey, this looks good. What do we need to do to scale?” Steven said. “By bringing these types of technologies in, we can be a big tailwind, and use simple processes to empower and enable our people globally.”

Creating Custom Solutions

Javillo and the Arcadis team were able to use the functionality of Bluebeam to match their changing needs. “Once we really got the flavor of Bluebeam, we really wanted to make it our own,” he said. “As good as it was out of the box, we really wanted to customise it, and tailor it to our own business use and our own project use cases.”

Once he figured out the most optimal way to use the software to meet the team’s unique needs, he was able to share those benefits with his team. “We need to ensure that our people are using the full benefits of platforms, to be able to do their role on a particular project,” Javillo said. “That’s why we’ve established toolkits and profiles.”

These tools allow stakeholders to quickly identify their roles and use the tools they need, and keep track of what stages a project has already passed through, closing comments and moving forward effectively.

On both the client side and internally, these processes have enabled Javillo and the rest of the Arcadis team to reach new heights of efficiency. “We’ve not only improved and simplified the operation indicators, but it also enhanced the digital collaboration with the clients and joint venture with its features,” Javillo said.

With a global team to coordinate, many of whom are working from home, Javillo shared that Bluebeam has positively connected with the firm’s people-centric work culture. “Another way we’ve been able to measure outcomes is just our increasing collaboration with working from home,” he said. “We have flexible working arrangements for teams across different countries, different states.”

By using Bluebeam as space to connect and collaborate, stakeholders are able to more efficiently cross tasks off their to-do list and stay on track for improved productivity.

For other firms considering implementing Bluebeam, Javillo has one piece of advice. “Start small,” he said. “Focus on a small project. Understand your needs as an organisation and the clients’ needs as well.”

With a foundation in relationships and an emphasis on collaboration, Bluebeam has helped the Arcadis team stay focused on what matters, working together more effectively and efficiently on a global scale.