MASTERING THE ART OF
DIGITAL COLLABORATION
More and more construction companies are embracing the benefits that a digital collaborative environment, like Bluebeam, offers for their teams.
BLUEBEAM IS HELPING STAKEHOLDERS WORK COLLABORATIVELY ON SOME OF THE BIGGEST INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS GLOBALLY. PETER HARRIS, DIGITAL ENGINEERING LEAD FOR ARCADIS, SHARES HIS TEAM’S EXPERIENCE WITH THE SOFTWARE.
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group of engineers bending over sheets of plot paper spread sporadically across the table and itching their heads (figuratively) as they work through design challenges is perhaps the most typical image that comes to mind when one imagines engineering consultants at work. But is the image still true? For the most part, the answer is no. If there was any consulting engineer who had resisted the shift from the horizontal table to the vertical screen, the pandemic and the inevitable physical distance it created 36
ROADS DECEMBER 2021
between project stakeholders is bound to have changed that. After all, there’s not much point marking up changes on a sheet of paper if it cannot be physically passed on to the next person for reviewing. Even before the pandemic, companies like Arcadis, a leading design, engineering and consultancy solutions company with nearly 30,000 staff around the world, had long realised the importance of a digitally collaborative environment like Bluebeam, which allows them to review design documents and drawings in real-time. But as Peter Harris, Arcadis’ Digital Engineering
Lead for Mobility notes, the team began to appreciate this even more in the aftermath of COVID. As a consultant on major infrastructure projects globally and across Australia, including on roads, bridges, tunnels and railway projects, Harris says there could be up to a hundred people working on the same project document set at any given time and at different stages of the project’s progress. “Across our global team, we have been using Bluebeam for nearly five years, but since COVID struck last year, we have found even more uses for it and we’ve come to
