How Wessex Water Improved Collaboration and Efficiency with BIM 360

Wessex Water is a regional water and sewerage business serving 2.8 million customers across southwest England. As the only water company in the UK that acts as an owner, operator, designer, and contractor, they have in-house engineering and construction teams that focus on managing the whole lifecycle of their assets and environmental and ecology issues. To improve outcomes for their customers while finding the most efficient ways of working, Wessex Water implemented BIM 360 within Autodesk Construction Cloud™ to centralise data, thus improving communication.

Implementing Digital Workflows and Digital Tools

Adam Bear, Strategic Digital Manager, and Paul Verner, Principal Digital Engineer at Wessex Water, began identifying improvements to Wessex Water’s working methods in preparation for the UK water industry’s five-year asset management and investment period, AMP7. Although they had many digital tools within Wessex Water, many of them were being used in analogue ways.

Digitalising current workflows, such as their design and review process, means Wessex Water can concentrate on developing proactive and data-rich maintenance schedules for their wastewater services. This helps them to improve the performance of the assets they own.

“Understanding the performance plan of an asset is vital, so we need to make sure we’re capturing, managing, and exchanging accurate and up-to-date project information seamlessly from project conception all the way through to asset maintenance,” says Adam Bear Strategic Digital Manager at Wessex Water.

Improving Ways of Working within the Water Industry

The team recognised that a common data environment would help improve communication by creating a single source of truth for all project data.

“We first rolled out using BIM 360 within our mainlaying team. The technology we were using had a convoluted way of setting projects up. Setting up a project could take two or three days, but we found we could set up projects in BIM 360 in two or three minutes, so we instantly saw the benefits from the solution,” says Adam.

Integrating BIM 360 with other Autodesk products also allows more team members to access project data easily.

“Before using BIM 360, not all our team were comfortable using 3D models in Navisworks alone. BIM 360 makes it easy to use 3D models – it’s more intuitive and suited to its purpose. It has helped our teams be more comfortable working in 3D.”

– Adam Bear, Strategic Digital Manager

Standardising for the Future

BIM 360 usage increased by nearly 400% in just one year meaning Wessex Water are able to implement ways of working that better utilise the data they capture. Adam reflects, “We want to get to move to a place where owning our data and managing it better means we can do more with it.”

The plan is for BIM 360 to be Wessex Water’s standardised common data environment on all projects. To better manage its assets, Wessex Water wants to use more functionality available with internal and external collaborators.

“Encouraging and empowering our supply chain partners and employees alike to learn more about their projects by making data easily accessible can only be a good thing – it’ll support more innovative and sustainable decisions in the future.”