Customer Story: Sweco

Sweco plans and designs the cities of the future. The firm employs more than 14,500 people who apply their engineering, planning, and design expertise to overcoming many of the world’s most pressing growth challenges. The results are more-sustainable buildings, more-efficient infrastructure, and better access to clean water.

Challenge

When Sweco was selected to develop a 10-kilometer extension to the light-rail system in Bergen, Norway, the firm was tasked with doing more than just follow a Building Information Modeling (BIM) process. The client also wanted Sweco to provide cloud-based visibility into progress and issues—linked to the 3D project model. Realizing that no available solution offered the required degree of issue management detail and visualization, Sweco turned to Autodesk Consulting and Forge for help.

How Sweco solved it with Forge

Sweco worked with Autodesk Consulting to create its own tool. But rather than develop a solution from scratch, the team assembled it from proven building blocks. Sweco looked to its long-time tool Navisworks project review software to aggregate design work into a single 3D model housed in the cloud. For detailed issue tracking at the task level, Sweco chose a widely used enterprise software development tool from Altassian called Jira. Forge APIs provided the glue to link issue tracking in Jira to 3D models. The Forge Model Derivative API translated the Navisworks model into lightweight viewables for display in the Forge Viewer. To store and retrieve the model, and to link it to Jira data, the team turned to the Forge Data Management API.

The team named its new solution SMaRT—Sweco Model Review Tool—and began using it on the project after just a few months of development on the Forge platform. Today, more than 300 users across more than 30 disciplines use SMaRT to view the latest design model, track issues, and collaborate. At any one time, the team tracks approximately 3,000 issues—each detailed at the task level and linked to the 3D model. Even the client regularly turns to the solution to keep up to date on progress and review issues.

Forge highlights include the following:

Delivers fast access to Jira issues that display within the context of the 3D project model.
Saves as much as 150 hours per week across the project team thanks to cloud-based visibility into project models and data.
Filters issues by location within the model to speed reviews and issue resolution.

"Without Forge, there’s no way we could have developed a solution that met all our client’s requirements. Developing from scratch would have been too slow and expensive. Forge made SMaRT possible."

Martin Amdal, Senior Engineer and BIM Specialist, Sweco