Atkins, a global leader in the design, engineering, and project management consulting, increased its design efficiency by 40% after implementing AVEVA E3D. With 3D laser scanning capabilities and cloud integration, the company was able to reduce risk, improve design quality, and save costs on brownfield project execution.
“We trialled AVEVA E3D. We found that getting drawings out in this way would reduce the delivery time of structural drawings by 40%. That’s a lot; 40% saves a lot of money, especially if you’re looking at massive projects such as the Apache Energy project.”
– Jim Wright; Design Team Lead, Atkins
Goals
- To reduce time needed for deliverables.
- To use 3D laser scanning to enable Lean methods in the brownfield project execution.
Challenges
- Industry, company and project standards had to be complied with.
- The cost of doing business in Australia is high.
Results
- Design efficiency has been increased by 40%.
- Global deployments are now set up in days, not months.
- Atkins is overall more competitive in the world market.
AVEVA Helps Atkins Maintain a Competitive Edge
Australia – Atkins is one of the world’s leading design, engineering and project management consultancies, employing some 18,000 people across the UK, North America, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Europe. Its breadth and depth of expertise, and its drive to continually ask ‘why’, has enabled the company to plan, design and deliver some of the world’s most complex and time-critical projects.
Competing in the World Market
Western Australia is an expensive place to do business, so its industries need to be particularly efficient at adding value if they are to compete in world markets. In addition to the challenge of creating fast and accurate deliverables, the majority of Atkins’ projects are brownfield ones with difficult access conditions and often inaccurate or incomplete-as-built information available. Traditional surveying techniques can be slow and costly. 3D laser scanning offers a much quicker, cheaper and more efficient alternative; large areas can be accurately scanned in a very short time. Atkins needed a 3D design tool that had tight point cloud integration.
Time-saving Technology from AVEVA
Atkins decided to put AVEVA at the centre of its engineering. The use of AutoCAD was abandoned and drawings were generated directly from PDMS instead. Atkins had no hesitation in migrating to AVEVA E3D and updating its PDMS-based procedures to take advantage of the new capabilities.
“AVEVA E3D also reduces the extent of site survey. We only have to survey the tie-in points and any identifiable pinch points. Some pinch points you can’t identify until later, but even if we do miss one, AVEVA E3D enables us to take quick and effective corrective action after the fact. We not only gain speed and reduce risk, we also increase design quality, which leads to further cost and time savings on site.”
– Jim Wright; Design Team Lead, Atkins
Atkins used AVEVA E3D on the Varanus Island Compression Project (VICP) for Apache Energy. It was a complex greenfield project, but with a lot of brownfield tie-ins and a demanding 14- week design schedule. This highly collaborative, 8,500-man-hour project involved all engineering disciplines, as well as the client, at each step of the design process. Modular design enabled Atkins to run multiple teams in tandem to fasttrack the work. As a result, they were able to deliver the completed design in just 13 weeks.
Atkins is in the process of launching its new global design strategy, in which AVEVA technology will play a prominent role. With AVEVA E3D and laser scan data, engineers anywhere in Atkins can undertake extensive and accurate brownfield projects without ever having to set foot in the actual facility.
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