Four Aconex Customers Win 2015 Constructech Vision Awards

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 10, 2015) - Aconex Limited (ASX: ACX), provider of a leading cloud collaboration platform for the global construction industry, today announced that four of its customers have won 2015 Constructech Vision Awards. These awards acknowledge companies that have used technology in an innovative way to improve their competitiveness.

The winners -- AECOM, Pomerleau, Hensel Phelps, and Nalcor Energy -- accepted their awards at the Constructech Vision Awards ceremony, following the Technology Day event on August 27 in Schaumburg, Illinois. Constructech also recognized Aconex as the solutions provider behind its customers' award-winning use of technology.

"Every year the Vision Award winners continue to surprise me, leveraging technology that provides auspicious benefits to the organization, helping them rise above the rest," says Peggy Smedley, editorial director, Constructech. "This is an opportunity for others in the space to learn how technology can provide a competitive advantage."

AECOM - Gold Award, AEC/Design

AECOM and HNTB formed a joint venture to provide design services for the Green Line Extension project, a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure initiative of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The development will extend the oldest light-rail line in the U.S. to improve public transit service, air quality and travel times, while reducing automobile congestion, in densely populated areas. This complex, high-profile government project requires the tracking and reporting of 400 certifiable elements in 12 different disciplines across seven contracts from initial design through final construction. Each contract contains between 3,000 and 7,000 drawings, with more than 500 common specification sections.

Using the Aconex platform, AECOM achieved the following project benefits:

• $500,000 per year saved in employee costs. Without Aconex, one person would have been needed to manage each of the seven contracts. With Aconex, just two in total are needed.
• $300,000 per year saved from three additional employees who would have been required to track certifiable elements through multiple contracts.
• Nearly 50% reduction of contractor submittal turnaround times, from 30 days to 17. This diminished the risk of penalties for missed deadlines and eliminated the requirement for weekly tracking.
• Three times faster document search and retrieval.
  
  

Pomerleau - Gold Award, Builder/GC Commercial: More than $500 million

The US$265-million Sorel-Tracy Detention Centre is a large, complex and time-critical public-private partnership (PPP) project, requiring a sizable Pomerleau design and construction team. Approximately 200 individuals representing 30 different stakeholder organizations -- including contractors, subcontractors, vendors, and engineering firms -- make up the larger, cross-company project team. The principal stakeholder is the local community. As a PPP, the project is subject to close monitoring, regular reporting and high public visibility. Pomerleau must meet compliance requirements that include strict confidentiality for the handling of information associated with the construction of a prison and its security systems.

With the Aconex platform, Pomerleau improved project management in the following ways:

• 30% reduction of turnaround times for design reviews, RFIs and documents, with deadlines being met or surpassed in 95% of cases, compared with 60% previously.
• Significant cost savings per week as a result of risk mitigation and avoidance of financial penalties associated with liquidated damages resulting from missed project milestones.
• Reduction of administrative employees from nine to five and just one document controller.
• 30% savings -- or $80,000 -- in server hardware, software and operations costs, compared to enterprise content management software.
• 99.9% reduction of confidentiality breaches through document security, based on the number of security investigations required by authorities.
  
  

Hensel Phelps - Silver Award, Builder/GC Commercial: More than $500 million

The new Benjamin P. Grogan and Jerry L. Dove Federal Building, formerly the U.S. Federal Office Building, in Miramar, Florida, is the regional headquarters of the Miami Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The project includes enhanced security specifications, an enclosed parking structure and multiple buildings located on a 20-acre site. After completing construction, Hensel Phelps formally handed the built asset over to the owner, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). The GSA then contracted ongoing operation and maintenance (O&M) of the facility to a third party. Hensel Phelps was contractually obligated to provide the GSA with copies of all project documentation, drawings, building information models (BIM), and manuals, which the O&M contractor required to run the 380,000-square-foot, $160-million facility.

Using Aconex Smart Manuals for O&M handover, Hensel Phelps achieved the following efficiency gains and risk reduction:

• 30% savings in the time required to import all project data for O&M manual creation. With 4-5 office engineers, the savings equated to more than $10,000 per month.
• Over $100,000 savings in hourly engineering staff costs. Engineers were reduced from six to one during the final three months of manual compilation.
• 90% to 100% accuracy improvement, reducing the risk of incorrect information and rework at handover.
• $50-$100 cost savings per incident over the asset's life. Maintenance response times improved by 1-2 hours per incident through access to O&M information with click-on asset tagging rather than searching through binders and CDs/DVDs.
  
  

Nalcor Energy - Silver Award, Corporate Owner: Transportation/Communications/Utilities

Nalcor Energy is currently building Phase 1 of the Lower Churchill Project at Muskrat Falls on the lower Churchill River. The project includes an 824-megawatt hydroelectric facility with two dams and a powerhouse, plus nearly 1,500 kilometers of transmission lines and other associated infrastructure. When completed in 2018, the Muskrat Falls Hydroelectric Generating Facility will be the second-largest hydroelectric plant in the Newfoundland and Labrador province. At its peak in 2015, the project will employ more than 3,100 workers. Complicating logistics, many of the individual construction sites are remote, accessible only by plane. Workers typically follow a 14-days-on/seven-days-off schedule.

• C$2 million saved in IT infrastructure costs. The cloud-based Aconex platform enabled Nalcor to avoid capital expenditures related to hardware for operation and maintenance of servers and software upgrades.
• 112 tons of paper saved. Electronic document management capabilities eliminated the requirement to print hard copies of most documents.
• Improved turnaround time for 300,000 technical documents from 30 days to an average of 10 days. Workflow efficiencies and an automated review process reduced the hours required for this task by two-thirds.
• Acceleration of the time required to issue transmittals from two days to an average of one hour and to upload digital documents from one day to five minutes.
  
  

About Constructech Magazine

Constructech magazine is where construction and technology converge. The publication influences construction professionals to unleash the business value of technology. constructech.com

About Aconex

Aconex Limited provides a leading cloud collaboration platform for the global construction industry. The platform connects owners, contractors and their project teams in the construction, infrastructure, and energy and resources sectors, providing project-wide visibility and control between the many different organizations collaborating across their projects. With more than 60,000 user organizations and approximately $1 trillion of project value delivered in more than 70 countries, Aconex is the industry's most widely adopted and trusted platform. Founded in 2000, Aconex has 41 offices in 22 countries around the world, including headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and San Francisco, California. The company's ordinary shares are traded on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) under the ticker code ACX.

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