Stuck in the office struggling to meet a deadline?

The agony of overtime

No one wants to sit for hours in a half-empty office every night, racing to meet a deadline. But that’s what a large project often involves. Worse, it might mean a lot of travel and relocation of staff. This disruption is frustrating for everyone and can negatively impact health. Not to mention the financial drain on your bottom line.

Flexible and remote working should be one way to minimise this pain. Businesses across a range of industries have adapted modern processes to enable this. Instead of staying back in the city for hours each night, or flying interstate, their staff can work from the comfort of their own home.

But the adoption of these processes has been very slow within the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) space. Most attempts to bring a flexible working environment into the AEC industry have made things more complex. Disorganised filing, sluggish file transfer, revision conflicts: all of these can cause major issues.

The sheer size of data sets produced by geospatial software packages has made the adoption process impossible for some. Connecting via VPN from home, on a poor connection or using generic cloud sharing services have caused frustratingly slow data transfer times, missing files and even data corruption. The benefits here have not outweighed the costs and pain points. It wasn’t supposed to be this way!

The working from home revolution must have skipped the industry, right?

Why going flexible works

The simple fact is that these issues are worth resolving, as research shows.

Staff in organisations with flexible working conditions are happier to work longer hours than those who are grinding it out in the office. Employees feel obliged to return the favour or trust. Or they’re motivated to produce above expectations when provided with working conditions, gifts or support above the perceived norm.

Flexible working also improves output. When employees can work when and where they want, they complete most work while they’re inspired. This is all the more critical with creative professionals such as designers.

Work-life balance is much better. Staff can more easily meet family and personal commitments, before returning to work in the comfort of their own home.

An easy solution: designed for designers

We built 12d Synergy with civil designers and the overall AEC industry in mind. It provides organisations, staff and contractors with flexibility and opportunity. Our clients have enjoyed improved work-life balance and increased opportunities by being able to collaborate on projects from a remote location, as well as bid for work which they previously could not.

One of the great features of 12d Synergy is the remote access and access from the field. You can access all of your data and files – including everything you need from 12d Model, CAD and Email – wherever you are in the world. This could be a worksite office, a client’s office and of course from the comfort of your home.

Slow internet connections are no longer a problem. 12d Synergy’s intelligent data transfer function reduces data by around 90%. This dramatically reduces bandwidth requirements and transfer times.

Even without internet access 12d Synergy can provide you with great benefits. It takes your project files offline, so you can work on them from your local C drive and later update the master file once you return to the network. This cuts data and administration time by ruling out the need for copied files, and the need to manually update revisions when returning to work.

Flexible working – could it work for you?

Over 2000 12d Synergy users are experiencing the flexibility of a modern workplace system from WSP, Aurecon and Jacobs right through to small consultants LDEng and Milton Services.

“Plenty of (12d Synergy) users on the WestConnex have reported that they’re really happy to have avoided long commutes and wasted times in airports, hotels and taxis.” – Ed Wilson, Aurecon – 2016 12d International Conference.

Book a demo and learn more about flexible working with 12d Synergy.