How Data Provides Mercury Engineering with Greater Insight and Predictability across Its Projects

The Road to Standardisation

Going beyond their duty as a builder, Mercury turns clients into partners and builds strong relationships that thrive.

“Our company grew very quickly and added a number of projects to our portfolio. This meant that we began using several different platforms and methodologies across different projects and regions. It soon became obvious to us that a more standardised approach could improve our efficiencies and give us greater results,” reflects Aisling Goff, Business Unit Quality Manager for Mercury’s data centre business unit.

Ronnie Christie, Business Unit Manager at Mercury, knew that using technology more smartly could better support the team to create continuity. “We recognised that different sites within a division were reporting differently to the directors and their clients. So a big ask of the technology solution we chose was something that could help us standardise our reporting mechanisms,” says Ronnie.

When choosing a technology solution, Mercury adopted BIM 360 within Autodesk Construction Cloud™. The team initially used the solution for document control and generating snag lists but decided to use it on a new build project that spanned the entire construction phase.

The team developed a comprehensive learning and development strategy to support employees in using the technology. The team ran training sessions for groups and individual employees and created peer mentoring sessions for individuals to learn from each other, with the help of technology champions for the platform.

During this project, Mercury decided to mandate using BIM 360 on all projects moving forward.

“We knew that we’d need to approach our BIM 360 rollout to the business in a slow and structured way. We got the basics working really well on our first project, and it was only after this that we introduced more functionality to the team on the next project to ensure a smooth transition to the wider team.”

– Aisling Goff, Business Unit Quality Manager

Getting The Most From Data to Improve Communication and Collaboration

For Mercury, when it comes to integrating technology into their business, the team has focused on using historical project data more richly to develop better project insights. “We’ve integrated BIM 360 with Power BI to export data on quality, health, and safety. We were unable to get this visibility before. Now we can draw greater insights from our projects to better manage risk, cost, and quality,” says Aisling.

Better insights captured from project data also improves the construction process, supports the health of a business, and improves the employee experience. “When new colleagues join and work with existing teams on different projects, they understand fully what processes they need to follow and what information we capture to measure our performance,” says Ronnie.

BIM 360 also enables collaboration across the supply chain. “We now use BIM 360 to communicate formally with all of our project stakeholders,” says Aisling. “It’s where all project communication takes place and acts as a central source of truth for us.”

With BIM 360 as its common data environment, Mercury’s teams have complete visibility of the status of all their projects. “All submittals and RFIs go through BIM 360, and our supply chain partners use the solution in the field to report on health, safety and quality. We also use the solution to manage our client teams, ranging from resolving questions that need clarification, verification, and design workflows. It works really well for us as we use the solution to manage up and down as well as across teams,” remarks Aisling.

Setting The Business up For Continued Success

For Aisling and Ronnie, the benefits of working more digitally are twofold – not only do their teams deliver a better client experience, but it also ensures they are set up for success from the project’s onset.

“If I had to pull out my favourite thing about BIM 360, it would definitely be that it enables us to use the same parameters when it comes to analysing our data. This means we have a standardised way of reporting to use the data better.” For Ronnie, benchmarking across teams and seeing how they are progressing when audit reporting supports him in his role. According to Ronnie, “I’m able to gauge how jobs are running in parallel with each other, which has been really useful.”

Looking to the future, Mercury plans on ensuring all their teams across the company are getting the most from BIM 360 using the functionality available. In addition to this, working in collaboration with their clients, they are promoting the benefits of implementing standardisation and digital workflows within the AEC industry.