How Stowe Australia Took Autodesk Construction Cloud from Proof of Concept to a Business-wide Solution

Stowe Australia is the country’s largest privately owned electrical and communications contractor. In its over 100-year history, Stowe has built an industry reputation for service excellence.

A lot of this service reputation has been built on the knowledge gained by its employees – many of whom have worked for the company for years. While project data was being shared within the company, it was often done manually, relying on the memory and experience of employees. There was a business need to take this institutional knowledge (which was operating in silos at a project and employee level) and make it accessible to anyone in the business that needed it. 

“‘Data beyond the project level’ is my little tagline,” says Matt Fern, Digital Engineering Manager at Stowe Australia. “That’s what I'm looking to achieve for the business.”

This need to find new ways of shared learning led Stowe to explore Autodesk Construction Cloud. Matt took it on himself to first become an expert in the software solution. Today, Stowe is using Autodesk Construction Cloud across its units – but it took the business a while to get here.

From test to rollout

As someone who had been using Autodesk products since 2005, Matt was keen to evaluate Autodesk Construction Cloud when he heard of it in 2021.

Matt emailed Stowe’s implementation partner, ARKANCE, to learn more about how Autodesk Construction Cloud works. This outreach soon led to a proof of concept to help the business understand if the solution fulfilled its requirements. The proof of concept ran for about a year, with a small team tasked with testing out the capabilities of Autodesk Construction Cloud.

“We chose some select people in the business, and they were sent away without any direction – without any prescribed use for the software at all,” says Matt.

“We asked them to go and play with it. We said, ‘go and tell us what it could be used for.’ We had our own understanding of what it could do, but we wanted those people to use it in different ways across a variety of projects.

“It was basically their testimony in the end that got this over the line,” he adds.

After that, the process began to roll out the solution across the whole business. Matt has now taken on an educational role, ensuring that everyone who needs it has access to the latest capabilities and knowledge.

Taking data beyond the project level

In the past, Stowe had not consistently applied learnings from its project data to its wider business. On each project, Stowe employees used several point solutions in their individual areas, which created data silos. However, once realising the problems that these data silos might cause, teams started sharing documents in their private cloud-based drives in a way that bypassed their local servers.

While these mitigations made it easier for individual teams to collaborate, data was not on a central platform. Autodesk Construction Cloud is now helping Stowe achieve the agility and collaboration of a cloud-based solution while centralising the ‘source of truth.’

One of the biggest benefits of Autodesk Construction Cloud has been the ability for Stowe’s teams to leverage data as part of a common data environment (CDE). Such an environment is seen as having the ability to enable efficiencies across Stowe’s operations.

But Stowe’s ambition for Autodesk Construction Cloud goes beyond the builders on site. It wants every department to be able to add, access and use data from the platform – from estimators, engineers, HSEQ, project managers and the executive to name just a few, with many more in between.

“When we evaluated Autodesk Construction Cloud, it made a great case for an end-to-end solution,” says Matt. “And by end-to-end, we mean teams from estimation/tendering all the way over to handover and into facilities management.”

The technology roll-out is the largest in Stowe’s history. “Nothing has made this much of an impact, or been responsible for this much of a change,” says Matt.

Data-driven efficiency

Stowe is already seeing efficiency gains with Autodesk Construction Cloud.

Matt describes a typical case where a site manager would previously have had to walk from the site to their office to retrieve a plan before heading back to the site again. With all the drawings and models available on the cloud, they can now simply pull up the plan on their mobile device, saving significant time on site.

In fact, during the proof-of-concept phase, leaders at Stowe saw an average time saving of 7 minutes per user per day, just from the adoption of the cloud-based Docs environment. Once rolled out across Stowe’s entire 1500-person staff, this could represent significant efficiency boosts.

The solution helps ensure that everyone has access to the latest data at the moment they need it – helping save time by reducing mistakes, improving safety procedures, automating administrative tasks, and allowing better decision making at all levels of the business.

But for Matt it’s the increased accuracy, collaboration and coordination that is the real game-changer.

“Of course we’re seeing efficiencies – you can’t deny them. But the bigger gain we’re seeing is the interaction between our business units – there’s improved communication and continuity of data,” he says.

Matt gives another example – data entry. “Digitalisation of our workflows in Autodesk Construction Cloud means that we should only have to enter data once,” he says.

“Once it’s in the system, if you’re working on that project you should never need to enter that number again. And that ensures that we maintain accuracy – by only entering it once, it’s got less chance of being incorrect.”

It’s one data point, but it’s illustrative of the whole range of benefits that come from a common data environment, he says.

“All this shared data can be interpreted in any way we want – the benefits will continue for years.”

The Autodesk Construction Cloud solution has also significantly reduced paper usage, with data being recorded and shared digitally.

And while the sustainability benefits of lower paper usage are clear, Matt also points to the major gains in data visibility. “As someone whose remit is to take data beyond the project level, paper is useless. It’s the worst form of storage – it’s dead data,” he says. With a CDE, he explains, data is searchable and accessible to everyone.

Platform of the future

Matt is clear that the adoption and optimisation of Autodesk Construction Cloud is an ongoing process, highlighting the continuous evolution of the platform. He expressed optimism about future enhancements based on end users’ requirements, and appreciates Autodesk’s responsiveness to user feedback, fostering a collaborative environment for shaping the future roadmap of the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform.

He acknowledges that there are still challenges to be worked through. Stowe has been in operation for over a century, and with that comes a lot of established ways of doing things. One of the benefits of Autodesk Construction Cloud is that it is adaptable for each of Stowe’s 14 branches around the country – in a way that is suited to local market conditions.

But the power of shared data, generated in one location but immediately available to other areas of the business, is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

“Companies of our size simply have to learn how to leverage their data better, or they’ll become redundant,” says Matt.

As a company that is already beginning to see the business value in the solution, Stowe advocates for mass adoption of Autodesk Construction Cloud across the industry.

“We want everyone to be using this – we want everyone to be in the same sandpit.”