Dépêches

Delivery of Delhi Airport Metro Express Streamlined With Aconex

Dépèche transmise le 14 septembre 2011 par Business Wire

Delivery of Delhi Airport Metro Express Streamlined With Aconex

NEW DELHI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--By supporting multi-company collaboration on a global scale, Aconex has helped to deliver the US$626 million Delhi Airport Metro Express project.

“Also, if Aconex had not been used, many more prints would have been required, most of which would have been unnecessary. Our printing machine would usually work around the clock because people tend to print everything – Aconex helped to reduce that”

Since being implemented in 2008, the Aconex online collaboration platform was used to link 430 project participants across Asia and Europe and manage more than 550,000 documents and correspondence items.

Delhi Airport Metro Express is a new line linking Indira Gandhi International Airport to New Delhi city centre. The six-station line is 22.7 km long, of which 15.7 km is underground and the rest elevated. The trains will travel at up to 135 km/h, instead of up to 80 km/h on the rest of the metro, providing a travel time of 20 minutes between the airport and Connaught Place, the city’s main shopping hub.

The line has been built using the public private partnership (PPP) model, under which the civil structures were built by Delhi Metro Rail Corporation and the system installation, integration and operations were delivered by private concessionaire Delhi Airport Metro Express Pvt. Limited (DAMEPL), a joint venture of Reliance Infrastructure and Spanish company CAF.

Mr. Hemant Garg, Assistant Vice President (IT) from DAMEPL believes that many of the project’s information- and communication-related challenges were alleviated by using a project collaboration platform.

“On this project, a lot of our suppliers were based internationally – Spain, Germany, Hong Kong – and so effectively collaborating across such a dispersed team was a significant challenge,” said Mr. Garg.

Aconex provided all the organizations involved in the project with a single, central platform for managing data such as drawings, documents and correspondence. All participants were able to access, distribute and track their information in real time, from any location and at any time. Mr. Garg found that, almost immediately, this reduced the time and cost of managing information.

“For a project of this scale we would usually have a central document control team which supported and managed each function's documents and register. Two-to-three months into the project, we realized that we didn’t need this team. Maybe just one person to do admin work, but the uploading, downloading and reviews could be done directly by the respective functional teams,” said Mr. Garg.

“Also, if Aconex had not been used, many more prints would have been required, most of which would have been unnecessary. Our printing machine would usually work around the clock because people tend to print everything – Aconex helped to reduce that,” he added.

Rather than being installed and managed in-house, the Aconex platform is delivered over the web using the Software as a Service model where Aconex is responsible for delivering product enhancements and for meeting required security, reliability and performance standards.

“From an IT perspective, Aconex is a very simple tool to deploy and use. The SaaS model has significant benefits, particularly in roll-out and accessibility. Without question, the system provided us with a more structured way to collaborate,” said Mr. Garg.

Through its global network of offices, Aconex was able to deliver on-the-ground training to get participants up and running fast. Following training, users had access to 24/7 helpdesk support.

Mr. Garg added, “Implementing and using a project-based system required a change in mindset but the training and support provided helped everyone in the project team to realize that the system was easy to use and they would benefit from it. Once team members saw the benefit, it caught on.”

Aconex, www.aconex.com, is the world's largest provider of online collaboration solutions to the construction and engineering industries and is the market leader in India. From its 40 offices, the company services US$260 billion worth of projects across 70 countries.