DOCUMENT CONTROL
AND BEYOND
DOCUMENT ORGANISATION AND CONTROL CAN HELP DIVERSE STAKEHOLDERS STAY ACCOUNTABLE AND ACHIEVE PROJECT GOALS ON LARGE INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS.
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hat do some of the biggest infrastructure projects in Australia have in common? Aside from billions of dollars worth of contracts and equipment, thousands of workers and endless project documents, some major transport infrastructure projects underway in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth share one more critical feature. These major Australian projects use a document control system, many of which are from leading construction project management software company InEight. InEight Document’s inherent flexibility caters to the wide variety of project specifics typical to major infrastructure works. The solution is a specialised construction document repository for capturing, controlling, versioning, analysing and distributing project documents, while also tracking their history. Rob Bryant, Executive Vice President – Asia-Pacific with InEight, says using document control systems that are not suited to multifaceted large-scale projects can lead to inefficiencies or rework. The risk, he says, is projects can run over time or budget. InEight Document is a project-centric solution that organises documents and makes them available to teams in real-time through desktop and mobile tools. It helps ensure everyone is working from a single source of document truth and is able to access the most up-to-date version of each document, wherever work finds them. “We have found on any project that there is an average of seven revisions to each document or drawing, and major projects can have towards one million project documents in total,” Mr. Bryant says. InEight’s solution uses metadata, the basic 38
ROADS APRIL 2020
With major infrastructure projects, it is important to start with the end in mind.
information that describes a document, to intelligently manage all documentation. “The solution helps categorise documents by type, area, status, date and originator,” Mr. Bryant says. Each project will have its own unique parameters for document management, and InEight Document enables each party to easily customise its work breakdown structure to the needs of each project. “With a simple system, you might have mail correspondence in one application, documents in another and photos in yet another. There is no connection there and, in reality, these documents are almost always related,” Mr. Bryant says. “A true system is going to connect the links between documents so people can leverage the connections to find things much faster.” With InEight Document, the user can create folder structures or use the metadata from each document to automatically create “dynamic” folders to help with search criteria. “You can define filters and other aspects
to help locate the document you’re seeking. InEight Document provides a lot of flexibility that you can’t get when you have mass documents in a raw system,” Mr. Bryant says. This project-centric solution allows unique searchability. The user can grant document access to the right people and reduce the risk of inefficiencies, rework or other errors. As many major infrastructure projects are now built through joint ventures or alliances, this means numerous collaborators and stakeholders need to have access to the correct project files. “When forming an alliance, you could have four or more major contractors, and they need to be able to work together in a neutral environment. Having a set of tools that are hosted on their behalf means there’s no argument about who holds the data,” Mr. Bryant says. “On a project, you have documents that need to be controlled by different parties. A controlled document is anything you want to use from a reference point of view where version control is important.”
