The PM Group Delivers Efficiencies and Time Savings to Better the AEC Industry

In 2021 when PM Group laid out its four-year digital strategy, one thing was clear—harnessing technology for project data capture delivered richer, more robust insights for clients, every time. Dedicated to driving up productivity, Key Service Provider to PM Group and digital champion, Jorge Alonso, knew this transition towards technology would require a proof of concept. It wasn’t long before PM Group adopted Assemble, a solution within Autodesk Construction Cloud™, to overhaul transparency and communication company-wide.

Overcoming Industry Challenges with Innovation

Made up of 3,500 people who operate out of 12 countries, PM Group’s geographical footprint spans Asia, Europe and the US. An employee-owned international project delivery company, PM Group serves up solutions to clients across the pharmaceutical, food, data centre and advanced manufacturing sectors. “We work closely with our clients to develop innovative solutions to address the needs inherent in some extremely complex and challenging projects,” says Coral Butler, Group Head of Digitally Enabled Lean Project Delivery at PM Group. “Above all, our focus in on safety, but we also pride ourselves on our technical expertise,” Coral explains. PM Group is integrating technology into the full project lifecycle. Jorge noted that challenges teams experience on one construction project are typically the same across others as well.

“We have found that data silos can cause work packages to breakdown, thus prompting our teams to defer to manual workflows to measure progress.”

-Jorge Alonso, Key Service Provider

By introducing Assemble, the team hoped to put an end to this very cycle that hinders a project’s productivity and broaden data accessibility across the board. “PM Group is constantly evaluating tools for efficiency savings, identifying which are best suited to solve complex issues,” says Jorge. Adding a solution like Assemble to PM Group’s toolbox helps to connect multidisciplinary teams across each project, ultimately increasing a project’s chances of getting completed on budget and on schedule. And at the very top of PM Group’s wish list was achieving data connectivity from a centralised location, and eradicating data silos altogether.

The Proof is in the Analytics

To test the efficacy of Assemble, PM Group compared the workflow efficiency gains between a mission-critical Denmark project that utilised Assemble, and an Ireland-based pharmaceutical project that was carried out in traditional fashion. The resulting analytics were undeniable.

“Being able to seamlessly and consistently track and capture data across teams drastically improved the health of our projects.”

-Jorge Alonso, Key Service Provider

Now, using Assemble, PM Group can granularly track and monitor progress from the design stages and on through the construction phases of each project with complete transparency. Being able to rely on this data means the team can collaborate, drive efficiency and reduce risk with more ease than ever before. This approach to projects also creates a transparent environment for design and constructability reviews, synchronising all project collaborators including the extended work package teams.

Time Granted by Cloud-Based Collaboration

On Assemble pilot projects, the cloud-based environment set the scene for real-time collaboration, allowing team members to follow the flow of information more easily. For Coral, the benefits realised by digitising workflows were obvious and twofold—delivering a better experience for the client and generating more meaningful data. That same data could be analysed using the PM Group’s original parameters too, which made reporting standardisation that much more seamless.

For PM Group, improvements to the client experience meant greater alignment with each project’s budget and timeline and offer more insightful project updates. Syncing model information made it possible to run real time iterations of a project’s process against its budget and timeline, to pinpoint and correct issues as they arose. Additionally, the new data aggregation functionality allowed the team to visually depict incremental project progress to stakeholders across the project’s lifecycle. When the time came to generate team-wide project status updates, Jorge found he could pull together the essential data components in half the amount of time. “Now everyone can access project reporting and updates with a few simple clicks. In the past, I would spend anywhere from three to four hours each day meeting with construction managers and designers to obtain the information I needed,” says Jorge. And, the benefits go further than reporting workflows alone.

“For an individual trade package on a project, we may need to submit up to 800 drawings through our project control checks – and we may have up to 15 packages on an individual phase of a project. Digitising this workflow has saved our project team significant numbers of hours.”

-Jorge Alonso, Key Service Provider

More Insights Means More Predictability

“Our projects now generate more insights, which gives us much greater predictability,” says Coral. More predictability means that PM Group can spend more time nurturing and building upon the trusted relationships with its existing clients. This is only one part of PM Group’s digital transformation journey. Plans are already underway to continue growing productivity gains, which should serve to improve the employee experience for their colleagues too. “PM Group is very open minded when it comes to evolving and changing, which is needed in an industry like ours,” shares Coral. Looking forward, the team aims to scale up the application of Assemble too, leveraging it in more projects across the group.