For many project managers in charge of industrial construction projects, the skyrocketing amount of associated data poses major administrative challenges – and generates hefty costs. Cloud-based platforms facilitate efficient data management and provide fast, reliable, and location-independent access to documents and information to everyone involved in the project.
Triggered by economic upheaval, recent months have marked a surge in digitalization initiatives at many companies. Alternative ways of working, such as working from home or remotely, have since become increasingly relevant. This evolution can also be seen in large-scale mechanical and plant engineering projects. These kinds of projects typically involve thousands of documents that have to be processed and approved by a number of people both within and outside the company. The ensuing data administration and management only serves to highlight how critical it is for industrial companies to have rapid and secure access to their project data.
The need for a central source of information in construction projects
Today, large-scale construction projects incorporate an enormous volume of essential information, ranging from documents, plans, and lists to data for Building Information Modeling (BIM). To successfully navigate and execute construction projects of this magnitude, companies need to rely on a digital project platform that makes the vast amount of data available as a “single source of truth” for every party involved.
A common data environment (CDE) is a shared data environment that stores and manages all relevant information in one central location. This enables everyone involved in the project to share important project documents with each other in a seamless, format-independent way.
Seamless data sharing thanks to a cloud-based project platform
A common data environment works most efficiently when it is implemented in a professional cloud solution. That type of data environment permits internal and external parties to access all relevant documents quickly from any location, which in turn expedites any kind of industrial construction project.
Based on the high-security Fabasoft Cloud, Approve on Fabasoft PROCECO is designed as an off-the-shelf product for end-to-end management and control of both technical data and documents. Approve brings together all project-related information from the different systems and then establishes links and correlations between the different pieces of data. As a result, everyone involved has access to the specific information they need to get their job done – without having to hunt it down by e-mail. Fabasoft Approve uses ISO 19650-1 as a guideline to create a digital map of the entire information lifecycle for industrial construction projects.
A common data environment is the future for industrial construction projects
Particularly in the mechanical and plant engineering sector, digitalization is instrumental for coping with the rapidly escalating volumes of data. Construction projects are already generating far more data than ever before. A cloud-based CDE is a necessity for companies who want to store and manage such large volumes of documents securely going forward, and is the key to ensuring that everyone involved in the project can communicate with each other efficiently and enjoy access to the same level of information whenever they need it.
