Introducing a new way to manage project data with the AECO industry

Digitalisation is great, but it also brought a whole lot of new challenges. When documents were not necessarily tied to paper and photos not tied to celluloid anymore, the amount of information produced immediately skyrocketed due to decreasing costs – with unforeseeable consequences for all industries including the design and construction world.

Suddenly the challenge was not how to translate information into shareable pieces of data anymore but how to stay on top of all that data being produced. [emaillocker id=”71749″]

This development has started decades ago and, despite an abundance of data management solutions, has only improved marginally ever since. In fact, in a lot of ways, it has gotten worse. Employees often spend hours looking for crucial information within an abundance of unorganised project folders, chaotic email inboxes and third-party cloud spaces. And once they
have found what they are looking for, they often still struggle to make the right decisions due to missing context in and around project files or a lack of functionality regarding sharing information.

The result: ever-increasing project costs, wasted productivity, a higher risk of potential litigation and increasing staff frustration.

 

Managing data, the old way

To overcome this struggle the AECO industry had to rely on available data management solutions which were mostly built for other, more static industries like manufacturing.

These so-called electronic document management systems, short EDMS, are basically just confined storage spaces for data. And although it may sound practical at first
to have a single location for all information, it quickly turned out to be impractical for a sector as dynamic and unpredictable as the AECO industry.

Once companies commit to them, they commit to having all their project data migrated into the system and consequently must follow a set of pre-defined workflows. From that point on files need to be manually tagged, renamed and categorised for them to be searchable and organised.

In short: They lack the flexibility AECO companies require to thrive and do their best work.

 

The Newforma way – an entirely new approach

To give professionals a solution that would adapt to their needs rather than requiring the opposite, a new approach had to be developed. More flexible, more practical and not
invasive like EDM systems.

This is how Newforma Project Center was born. Newforma´s ethos is to give architects, engineers, contractors, owners, project managers, quantity surveyors and other AECO professionals as much freedom as possible and at the same time provide all the functionality, they need to manage their project information sufficiently.

In order to achieve this Newforma foregoes the need to set up a new, confined space for project data. It simply uses the network infrastructure users already have, mostly on their
own servers or cloud storage, places itself like a layer on top of it and indexes all underlying information. This saves a huge amount of valuable time and resources as files do not
have to be moved at all. Everything simply stays where and the way it currently is. Newforma therefore can be implemented within days rather than months or even years.

After its installation companies can utilise Newforma to control and manage all their project information within only one, comprehensive tool, including emails, PDFs, drawings,
models, field reports and more. All files can be found within seconds via a simple keyword-based search and shared with an unlimited amount of external parties without
additional cost.

The key factor which makes Newforma special though is that all of this is being achieved without the rigor approach of breaking up a company´s existing workflows and structure
and forcing entire project teams to change the way they work. Everything just becomes much faster and streamlined, completed with additional state-of-the-art features.

As Built Environment Networking’s 2020 Badge Partner, Newforma is proud to bring this simple, yet extremely powerful principle to the Built Environment Networking community, sharing more information on the advantages of true project information management during the entire year.

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