Drake & Scull International PJSC (DSI), a regional market leader in the integrated design, engineering and construction disciplines of General Contracting, Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing (MEP), Water and Power, Rail, and Oil and Gas, and Water and Wastewater Treatment, has entered into a strategic agreement with Aconex, a global leader in collaborative project information management, to implement its highly advanced Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) platform built for construction and engineering across DSI’s offices and project operations.
The Aconex platform will enable DSI to manage its project data and documents across all its offices and projects due to the platform’s project wide collaboration, scalability, controlled sharing, and easy online and offline access. Through the use of the Aconex solution, DSI will be able to improve document control, increase productivity, reduce print outs, and recover lost time. The company also plans to set up regional centres of excellence to provide its staff hands on training with the Aconex software. Aconex’s project collaboration platform currently links 620,000 users across 19,000 projects in 70 countries, worth over $800 billion in project value. In the Gulf region, Aconex powers 85,000 users across 3,500 projects including Dubai Metro, Yas Island, Qatar Rail, and Dubai International Airport Concourse 3.
Ahmad Al Naser, managing director of Drake & Scull Engineering, said: “The Aconex implementation complements our recent ISO 27001 information security management standard certification, which spans our employees and processes and affirms the robustness of DSI’s IT systems and mechanisms. We have selected Aconex to implement its project collaboration solution across all DSI offices and project operations with an aim to reduce project risks, increase productivity and improve efficiencies. The increasing complexity of our projects and volumes of correspondence, combined with the increase in our workforce, necessitate the need to centralise and simplify project collaboration and document management.”
Al Naser added that Aconex is a trusted, proven brand that will help the company meet its goals of cutting down delays in the decision-making process and the associated costs.
Using the Connected BIM capabilities of Aconex, DSI has also increased the adoption of modern technologies such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), allowing for real time three-dimensional (3D) analysis of construction designs to identify structural weaknesses, heat signatures and design solutions well ahead of mobilisation on sites. Within the last few months, DSI has successfully deployed Aconex on a number of key projects, including the Dh1.1-billion ($300 million) Lamar Towers, the Dh 477-million Salboukh expatriate Residential Compound and the Dh190-million Al Dara Hospital, all in Saudi Arabia, and the Dh180-million Al Reef Residence in the UAE.
DSI is currently undertaking the implementation of Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, an integrated application suite of comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
