How Interserve Improved Field Collaboration When Time Is of the Essence

Interserve’s mission is to create better environments for people to live and work. With its wide range of services and expertise, the company was called upon to help in the UK’s battle against the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Their task was to take the blueprint of the nearly complete London Excel Nightingale Hospital and enhance it. In nine days, they used this enhanced blueprint to transform the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham into a clinical facility.

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Streamlined Planning and Collaboration is Key to Aggressive Timelines

Interserve, working on behalf of the NHS and the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB), was charged with delivering the facility in record time while adhering to strict social distancing measures. They needed a solution for colleagues to access project data and to communicate necessary changes quickly and easily.

Interserve had implemented PlanGrid within Autodesk Construction Cloud™ on a previous project and completed it on schedule. PlanGrid is a cloud-based construction productivity tool that enables teams to access digital drawings and other key documentation on-site from any mobile device.

How to Achieve Astonishing Field Collaboration

Over the very short lifecycle of the NEC project, 13 miles of bed bays were laid end-to-end, as well as 64 miles of cable. In addition to this, Interserve laid vinyl on the equivalent of 11.5 football pitches and 10 miles of medical-grade copper piping was put down so having the ability to access plans in real-time was crucial. This meant that the project team could focus more of their time on delivery as opposed to having to walk the expansive length and breadth of the NEC just to access project data.

As the drawings and plans were evolving on an almost hourly basis, we wanted to keep an accurate record and mark-up any changes. We also needed to make sure that what we were building on site was as close as they could be to the plans that were being made in the project office across the road.”

– Dan Harmer, Project Manager

Cloud-based Construction Management Provides Record-Breaking Results

In Birmingham, the NHS Nightingale was built by more than 50 Interserve Construction and Engineering Services employees and more than 400 sub-contractors in just nine days. 86,000 construction hours were clocked up during the project which was delivered to the most exacting clinical standards.

“Using a cloud solution allows you to pull and print off reports and means that as a Project Manager, you can make sure the right people are doing the right tasks. PlanGrid was absolutely the right tool for this job.”