CONTEXT & CHALLENGE
ITER is probably the most ambitious energy project in the world today. ITER aims at harnessing nuclear fusion power, a potential source of safe, non-carbon emitting and virtually limitless energy. ITER builds the largest and most powerful fusion device in the world and the first to generate net energy.
VFR joint venture worked under a contract with Fusion for Energy (F4E), the European Union’s organization for Europe’s contribution to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), to build the Tokamak complex and to design and build several auxiliary buildings at Cadarache, north of Aix-en-Provence in southern France.
The complexity of the project is immense, and the construction companies need to manage project schedules, with thousands of tasks. Most of these tasks depend on documentation, resulting in an average of 1,200 documents per month over 5 years. Documents include drawings, PFMs, RFIs, NCRs and others. Many stakeholders are involved at design time: designers, subcontractors, engineers and other members of the joint venture. Documentation approval may take several iterations when documents are rejected and further delays.
If a single document is not ready, linked tasks are delayed potentially causing millions of euros in losses. Every time a single task in the project schedule changes the level of risk for each document changes and all this is managed manually.
The main challenges related to the digital ecosystem where:
Fragmented data and non-interoperable tools used. For instance, they had to use two Electronic Documentation Management Systems (EDMS)
Digital tools imposed by contract.
Lack of visibility and understanding of workflows.
Current tools are not able to predict workflow evolution. Very challenging to control risk per document in real-time.
You can learn more about the challenges faced by the different roles involved in this use case by downloading the complete report.
SOLUTION
VFR used our innovative solution to control risks on workflows in real-time to avoid delays and budget overruns.
In particular, they used the Control enabler in our platform to control the risk of any document being approved late, causing potential delays in task execution and budget overruns. Beawre's platform was integrated with their EDMS, the Project Management tool, and various Microsoft Excel spreadsheets used to keep track of the documentation schedule.
The system:
Enabled AI-prediction to predict which documents would be approved late and may cause issues.
Helped users to prioritize tasks based on the actual level of risk, helping users to focus on tasks related to those documents with higher risk severity, in real-time, based on predictions.
Helped users to share identified risks across projects and departments.
Using Beawre’s AI based solution we can improve the visibility, minimize risks, and track the performance of our project. Like in the vast majority of construction projects, ours is very dependent on our capacity to respect the schedule commitments. With Beawre Control we can now get real-time analysis of our key drivers of the months to come, based on the project specific track-record in similar situations, what brings enormous management capacities for the whole of the organization. We can definitively improve our reactivity, and thus reduce budget overruns.
Oriol Ribas
Country Manager, Ferrovial
RETURN OF INVESTMENT
With Beawre's platform, VFR activated several improvements related to:
Project delay reductions: they estimate they can reduce around 1 month of delay per year.
Reductions of claims by providers and new sales opportunities: they estimate they can reduce claims by 25% and increase sales to their clients.
Total team's staff time optimization: through understanding workflow performance and bottlenecks they can reduce the total team's staff time by 5%.
They estimate they can reduce between 1 to 2 million euros annually, thanks to the use of Beawre's technology.
Ferrovial announced the project "Digitised Risk Management tools – AI and integrated data management – for schedule performance, ITER & NLE", using Beawre's AI-driven technology, as the winner of the Innovate Construction Awards 2021. In that edition, and under the slogan ‘Think Big’, more than 120 proposals were received from around the world, and awards were given to the 12 best on-site innovations and initiatives developed in 2021.
Watch Ferrovial telling the story by themselves here: How Ferrovial uses AI for next level Lean Project Management building first fusion reactor (beawre.com)
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