Aconex, a major provider of cloud and mobile collaboration platform for the global construction industry, said it has played a key role in the development of Terminal 5 at King Khaled International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

The joint venture of TAV Construction and Al Arrab Contracting Company (ACC) had used Aconex to manage information and processes for the design and construction of the new terminal.

TAV Construction is a member of the TAV Group Company, founded in 1997 by two leading Turkish construction firms, Tepe Construction and Akfen Construction.

Established in 2003, TAV has till date undertaken projects worth more than $17.2 billion, thus becoming Turkey's undisputed leader in the sector.

Terminal 5 is a design-build project valued at $430 million. The recently completed structure covers 106,000 sq m with a capacity, when fully operational, of 14 million passengers a year.

According to Aconex, the project proved challenging for the TAV-ACC joint venture, which had won the tender in 2013. The design phase required numerous meetings and discussions over many months between the joint venture and the client, Saudi Arabia's General Authority of Civil Aviation (GACA), before a final design was agreed on and construction could begin.

The target completion date of April 2016 did not change, however, resulting in an aggressive delivery schedule.

Not long into the project, it became apparent that existing processes for managing information were falling short, remarked project director Hassan Hammadeh.

"Certain documents were missing, resulting in conflicts and disputes between project team members. It was discovered that requests for information (RFIs) had gone unanswered for up to a year. Review and approval cycles for shopdrawings stretched out over weeks. The systems and tools being used were better suited to archiving documents than to collaborative project management," he stated.

With the completion date looming, Hammadeh and his team recognised the need for a more efficient way to manage the project.

"With Aconex, the project came back to normal," remarked Hammadeh. "The process for reviewing and approving drawings and other documents had been unacceptably slow. After we adopted Aconex, all documents were organised and easy to find, and team members were assured of reviewing only the latest versions."

"This helped avoid errors and rework based on outdated information. The approval process moved much faster," he added.

Hammadeh had experienced the Aconex project-wide collaboration platform first-hand while working on a previous project with TAV Construction - the Prince Mohammad bin Abdulaziz International Airport in Madinah.

Over 36,000 shop drawings and documents were migrated from the archiving system to Aconex, he added.

"Ready access to documents in a central location also accelerated workflows and other processes for the geographically dispersed project team. Designers were located in Europe, Istanbul (Turkey) and Dubai (UAE), while contractors and manufacturers were located around the world, from the US to Singapore and Hong Kong," he noted.

In addition to faster approval, Aconex helped the Terminal 5 project team resolve or avoid disputes because all documents, communications and workflows were permanently stored in an audit trail, making it easy to determine who approved what and when within minutes.

As a result, more time was focused on delivering the project instead of managing conflicts between team members, observed Hammadeh.

According to Aconex, the performance of large construction and infrastructure projects is often measured by percentage of completion per month.

Airport construction project teams rarely exceed five per cent. On the Terminal 5 project, despite time constraints, the team achieved an extraordinary 7.2 per cent monthly rate of progress, it stated.

Aconex contributed positively to this achievement by streamlining the flow of information to enable multiple stakeholders - the owner, the engineers, the main contractor, and the subcontractor - to work on the same revision of drawings.

"Improving to that level of monthly progress was a major achievement for the joint venture and Aconex," said Hammadeh.

"Airports are among the largest, most complex and most visible infrastructure projects in the industry," said Henry Jones, senior vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and global accounts at Aconex.

"Many are constantly under construction and need to continue their operations and service to passengers through potentially disruptive conditions. We appreciate the opportunity to help TAV Construction turn around a challenging situation and successfully deliver the Terminal 5 project," he added.-TradeArabia News Service