How to share Engineering Data among Different Locations?

Embracing Flexible Working – A Modern Worksharing System.

A major project comes into the business and you know locally your demand is exceeding capacity.  By this stage there’s no question on whether you can deliver on this job or not, you’re committed.  The question is how?  More specifically; how are you going to manage this shortage to meet the demand?

It’s a question that almost every organisation in the industry is asking right now.

The answer is sharing your work out to remote offices, staff and contractors, right? – Flexible working!

Kind of like the edgy workplaces the major players in the Silicon Valley preach about.

Flexible office hours, working from home, remote collaboration, ping pong tables, sleep pods – alright so we aren’t suggesting that you go and fit out your office with ping pong tables – but that doesn’t mean the Architecture, Engineering and Construction space can’t adopt a flexible environment philosophy to enable remote collaboration, worksharing and flexible working.

You need to utilise remote staff to meet this demand and deliver the project on time and under budget!

The Battle on the Frontier of Geospatial Data Sharing

Disclaimer: Before you rush to sign up for this collaborative utopia – there is a reason this workplace hasn’t been widely adopted in the AEC space… previously there wasn’t an efficient and simple solution available.

The biggest challenge in the AEC space is the size of the data.  It seems to be no matter where you turn the data is getting larger as we adopt new technologies and procedures.  Project data sets continue to grow from what was a simple 5MB .dwg file a few years ago can now grow to include 100GB-1TB laser scanning data set. Sharing this data is a real challenge in the industry.

An infrastructure and land development boom has led to organisations throughout Australia and New Zealand adopting generic business systems.  These systems are great for sharing files from excel spreadsheets and word documents but seem to fall over when dealing with engineering data.

The end result is your technical department, your engineers, designers and drafters etc. are taking their data out of these systems and looking for worksharing work-arounds to enable flexible working.

Rather than waiting 20 minutes to transfer geospatial data, staff are making local copies on their C-drive or removable hard drives and copying data to a generic cloud solution.  The end result is duplicate data and duplicate data means risk! – Think about time lost on overwrites, time wasted working on outdated models, and the risks of issuing the wrong drawings.

Why You Need to Implement Flexible Working!

• Resolving these issues is worth your time.  Avail your team to the wonders of flexible working.
• Improve work-life balance
• Become an employee of choice – retain and attract top talent
• Build teams based on skills not geographical convenience
• Get your projects back on track – improve project efficiency in ways you never thought you could!
• Get your geospatial data up to 30x faster!

The 12d Synergy Solution

Out of the box 12d Synergy’s single source of truth and intelligent data transfer takes care of your data sharing issues.

Data is managed in a central server with a check-in/check-out system which protects data integrity and eliminates the risks of overwrites and duplicate data.

Working or active files are cached to your local workspace which gives users the experience of working off their local C-drive.  Each time data is transferred between your local workspace and the server 12d Synergy will recognise the changes in a project and only transfer those changes – This is what we call Intelligent data transfer and it reduces your data transfer by 91%, making you more efficient and freeing up your network.

“Prior to using 12d Synergy I worked on a project on the Sydney Office. When I returned to the Brisbane office to continue working on this project, it would take between 30 – 40 minutes to open the same project across the corporate network. Due to the local caching technology in 12d Synergy, similar projects now open in around 1 – 2 minutes. I can now work from any office in the country or from home and I know my data will load quickly. Plus I can make my edits without any delays. 12d Synergy saves me a lot of time every day.”

Ben Brown
Senior Civil Designer, WSP

Over 3500 12d Synergy users are sharing data from geospatial packages such as 12d Model, CAD, TUFLOW and Civil3d right now!

Embracing Flexible Working

Live from the sold out 2018 12d Technical forum at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre; 12d General Manager Joel Gregory provides an overview of Flexible Working and how it can enhance your business efficiency.