How Rodio Swissboring Pioneered Using BIM in Central America for Greater Transparency

With Autodesk Build, within Autodesk Construction Cloud™, Rodio Swissboring improved collaboration and transparency and moved their teams from 2D to 3D. As part of the wider Vinci group – a world leader in concessions, energy and construction, the depth and breadth of the group’s expertise spans 120 countries worldwide.

A Unified Approach to Data Management

Rodio Swissboring is a regional leader in special foundations and soil technologies. Specialising in a number of disciplines including deep foundations, slope stabilisation, ground treatment and improvement, marine projects, mining and geotechnical exploration, tunnels and specialised civil works, their team consist of highly expert geotechnical and civil engineers.

As long-time users of Autodesk Construction Cloud’s ™ BIM 360 platform, Rodio Swissboring’s goal was to implement BIM and introduce digital construction workflows. Their BIM team in Central America were pioneers for implementing BIM successfully within their own country and across their central America region too.

“Autodesk Construction Cloud enabled us to introduce a structured approach to storing, managing and accessing our data.”

–Jeyling Del Aguila, BIM Manager

Replacing Manual Methods

For BIM Co-ordinator Sofia Flores, the journey to centralising project data and standardising project management workflows is still ongoing. “Previously our team members struggled to locate one central area for shared project documentation,” shares Sofia. Not only was this time consuming but these methods created confusion because it was difficult to distinguish which version of a file is the most up to date.

The company’s previous processes of managing data manually across spreadsheets, local network drives and physical folders hampered true collaboration. Rodio Swissboring wanted to improve their current ways of working and knew implementing construction technology was a must for them.

They developed a comprehensive training plan to familiarise colleagues with the new platform. “We worked with the Autodesk Construction Cloud customer success team to run BIM training in our region, which everyone attended – even our company’s c-suite members,” says Jeyling.

“Before using Autodesk Construction Cloud, we worked predominately in 2D. As our team’s work is highly specialised, our clients often find it difficult to understand the implications of our work if we present it in 2D”

–Sofia Flores, BIM Co-ordinator

Building Transparency

Now the team use Autodesk’s Construction Cloud to visualise project information meaning it is easier to explain and present complex information.

As Rodio Swissboring ‘s teams became more familiar with working in a cloud environment, they began to explore the functionality available to them. “We can increase accuracy by minimising mistakes as models are updated in real-time,” says Jeyling.

And when you work with multidisciplinary teams who need access to information such as issues, communication is much clearer and more transparent. “We’ve reduced the amount of time we spend searching for, comparing or consulting about information on projects by 10%,” estimates Jeyling.

Transitioning Technology

Rodio Swissboring is now moving their first projects onto Autodesk Build, underpinned by Autodesk Docs, which unites the best of BIM 360 with additional new functionality to create a comprehensive field and project management solution. Transitioning projects onto this one platform to manage the end-to-end construction process, from the planning all the way through to design and operations phase, allows the company to manage their data more efficiently than previously.

“We have increased traceability within our projects which means we have greater certainty when it comes to making decisions and collaborating with all project partners,” says Sofia. Not only do the teams have more meaningful information to work with, but they have eliminated time consuming manual methods of working.

“Previously, we would have to manually sign a card to evidence that we had delivered a specific document,” says Sofia. “Now everything is tracked and traced with the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform.”

Features Fit for the Future

“The revision and transmittal workflow features are probably one of the most important ones for us,” Jeyling says. “It’s allowed us to keep better track of our work and provided us a helpful audit trail of information that we were unable to capture previously.”

By having more transparency, the team can avoid mistakes that could lead to costly rework. “We can now trace the information we have to the source which helps us to avoid thousands of dollars in rework,” affirms Sofia.

For Sofia, being able to visualise every document has been game changing. “The platform has fostered true collaboration between all the actors in each project, allowing them to access the necessary and updated information regardless of their role – this is something we found challenging previously,” says Sofia.

Using Autodesk’s Construction Cloud, Rodio Swissboring can focus on value-adding activities by reducing the number of onerous and manual tasks they complete.

“Everything is captured digitally now with a clear audit trail of changes. For us this radically reduces the chance of errors on our projects. The value this brings is immense.”