The construction industry is turning to advanced technology to shift toward a greener future. Here, VisiLean looks at how it used its single integrated platform to help Willmott Dixon streamline its operations – boosting both efficiency and sustainability in the process
Willmott Dixon is one of the most renowned construction and property services businesses in the United Kingdom. They are embracing innovations in their operations along with their construction projects as a part of their efficiency mission.
This mission also aimed towards adopting cloud-based production management software called VisiLean during their collaborative process. It improved their access to monitoring projects thereby moving a step forward towards speedy project completion for their clients.
To give their mission speed, Willmott Dixon introduced Collida as their extra hand, which was duly backed by qualitative construction.
Their prime game changers were:
- BRE Showhome is to be built through offsite manufacturing based on the principles of Passivhaus for minimising the building footprint at large
- BRE Showhome followed a panelised approach to ensure consistency in the project
Indeed, this project was about to dig up a unique set of challenges; but it would also present a new set of opportunities.
The challenge
The team of Collida had to face a lot of hardships in terms of working on site.
The primary reasons behind this are:
- Data variability in terms of onboarding new processes
- Manual workflows led to numerous human errors in the project
- A heavy need for a one-stop for all their data requirements concerning planning, visibility of processes of the design, manufacture and more
- Requirement for capturing real-time updates
- A single place for tracking and managing the constraints
- A collaborative digital platform for all their partners
- A free space to note down all the repeatable sections of work
The solution
VisiLean helped Willmott Dixon to streamline their project delivery. For this, the support team of VisiLean was always in touch with the site team for a smooth transition to a digital platform.
Once when the project workflow was in place, it was a process of learning for their team to efficiently use the tool. No sooner were they adept with the tool than they could successfully track all their construction activities for its successful implementation.
The BIM model structured their data in a visual format for future planning, detecting the trades as well as monitoring the present plan and its progress so far.
The outcome
Before VisiLean, digital tools like PowerPoint, Excel, etc. were heavily used by Willmott Dixon for their project management.
However, not only was it time-consuming, but it also lacked tracking the data with transparency in a collaborative environment.
These pain points were immediately addressed by VisiLean wherein generous data inputs about manufacturing, procurement, and production of individual activities were duly accommodated over a single timeline.
This was followed by consolidating the entire information to a specific location for the team to overview and save over two hours every week in terms of planning.
In this dire hour, Willmott Dixon took the wise decision of educating their supply chain partners about the user-friendly VisiLean software with our proactive team.
With thorough training, the team could easily deploy customised weekly, fortnightly or even monthly lookaheads with a click of a button. Simultaneously, it would be reflected in the ‘live’ programme and benefit the entire team equally.
This drastic change helped the Willmott Dixon team to:
- Address their material issues
- Link the plant call-offs
- Track the deliverables
- Follow up on constraints to individual activities and send immediate help on priority
- Monitor the production activities in one place
Moreover, all activities were coupled with a history for their team to capture numerous lessons for retrospection and undertaking the learnings.
Does your construction project encounter communication difficulties? When there is a lag in productivity, it certainly hampers your overall project performance.
At VisiLean, we’ll help you streamline your construction projects through our single integrated platform. Schedule a free call with us to get to know our features better.
A Build in Digital stakeholder, VisiLean is an innovative cloud-based lean production management solution for the construction industry.
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