Luxury developer uses Tandem to solve quality control and communication issues on high-profile projects

A luxury tourism developer in Western Asia is building high-profile resorts and hotels, along with an airport and supporting infrastructure with an emphasis on sustainability. Internally, the developer had a mature BIM department that had undergone digital transformation and was up to date with best practices for collaboration and data validation. Upon discovering Autodesk’s new digital twin solution, Autodesk Tandem, the BIM Director realized there was substantial potential to improve the speed of their processes and the ability to involve non-BIM stakeholders. 

For quality assurance and control, the developer established BIM deliverable requirements for the contractors which are collected throughout the project lifecycle. Their current quality control assurance procedures required the BIM team to open the Revit file or BIM data individually for each trade, then manually search for errors or data completeness with the help of a trade expert to validate model and parameter compliance. Before discovering Tandem, they had internally developed Excel-based tools attempting to speed up the process, but it was still too complex. This time-consuming and laborious manual process required many resources and was not an efficient communication strategy for non-technical stakeholders to understand project progress. After testing Autodesk Tandem, they realized the potential to cut costs and save on resources. They saw the potential to simplify and speed up the data verification process and remove the technical barrier for wider stakeholder engagement and alignment. 

The BIM Director reached out to the Autodesk Tandem Customer Adoption team for guidance, who provided training on procedures that improved their business process in three specific areas:

1. Simplified BIM data quality control checks 

The developer began to use Autodesk Tandem with the intent to simplify the process of aggregating and navigating the Revit models. Tandem enabled the Developer team to easily upload and federate Revit models for individual buildings and facilities, giving contextual visual reference to the data. Not only was it easier to manage the Revit files, it also simplified checking models for consistency, completeness, and accuracy. If issues were discovered, it was easier to share this information with project members.  

2. Better communication with non-technical stakeholders 

Tandem eliminated the need for non-technical stakeholders to be BIM savvy in order to visualize, interact, and collaborate with BIM data. The developer’s BIM team was able to filter through data on assets and communicate with wider stakeholders without using BIM software. For example, highlighting the portions of the projects in fabrication, yet to be created, and shipping status could be shown in Tandem. The ability to tie the data to the visual replica of the building assets allowed them to better communicate the condition of projects to all stakeholders without their need to understand the intricacies of BIM data.

3. Proof of concept for facilities monitoring through connected assets

Looking toward the future, the developer worked with the Tandem Customer Adoption team to test connected assets with sensors. They successfully connected and monitored sensor data from building air handling units for CO2 emission, temperature, humidity, dampness, and air pressure. The luxury developer has high sustainability goals. With IoT sensors and Tandem, they can better maintain their future buildings, while both tracking and meeting their eco-friendly goals. Autodesk Tandem’s Insightful Operations capabilities with connected assets will allow the developer to make data-driven decisions in the future and move toward condition-based monitoring. As a result, they will be able to reduce costs and work toward their sustainability goals.

The use of Tandem has accelerated the quality-control process for this developer. It’s eliminated the dependency on technical personnel for collaboration, saving them both time and resources. Communication of complex information has been simplified to all stakeholders, and it is now easier to share. The luxury tourism developer plans to continue using the digital twin as both a business solution, and as a tool to achieve their sustainability goals.