Design team goes paperless on large construction project; reportedly saves over $5 million by using Egnyte

I saw this article mentioned in the “Apprentice Group” on LinkedIn, and thought that it would be an interesting article to mention on Reprographics 101.

First, a couple of comments….

A couple of numbers mentioned in the article that really stuck out:

- mention that Balfour Beatty eliminated having to print 9,000 lbs of large-format paper prints

- mention that the design team saved $5.1 million in costs, by using “Egnyte”

At first glance, 9,000 lbs of prints sounds like a lot of large-format prints, but, by my calculations, 9,000 lbs of large-format bond paper would yield approximately 500,000 sq ft of large-format b/w prints. (I hope I did that calculation correctly, if not, I’m going to be embarrassed!) In today’s market, a large GC customer would likely be able to get 500,000 sq of prints produced for somewhere between $30,000 - $60,000 dollars (plus sales tax). Assuming my calculations are close to accurate and assuming my guess at the total-print-cost is a good guess, then there must have been a lot of other things that generated the rest of the $5.05 million in savings for the design team. And, now I’m wondering what those other savings were.

Here’s the article I mentioned….

Balfour Beatty Construction, LLC Saves Over $5 Million By Using Egnyte on Dallas Fort Worth Airport Reconstruction

Posted (on the Egnyte Blog) on May 16, 2012 by Emily Ganz

Egnyte Launches Vertical Market Initiative for the Construction Industry

Today we released a new case study outlining the benefits of deploying a hybrid cloud solution in a large scale construction project. Balfour Beatty implemented Egnyte’s HybridCloud File Sharing solution as a part of the Dallas Fort Worth Airport reconstruction, allowing their design team to save $5.1 million (71%) in costs and eliminating 9,000 lbs of paper printing. Utilizing the data from this and other construction industry customers, Egnyte is also launching its Construction Vertical Market Initiative (VMI).

“Egnyte provides our partners at BARC (the joint venture on the project, which includes Balfour Beatty) the flexibility they need and the security we require,” said Perfecto Solis, Vice President of Airport Development and Engineering at DFW. “As part of our sustainability initiatives we continue to look for ways within our organization to go paperless and hope to use products like Egnyte for future projects.”

Jeff Pistor, the Project Manager at Balfour Beatty noted “The Dallas Fort Worth Airport Terminal Reconstruction and Improvement Program presented us with a unique challenge because of the scale of the project and security requirements. The drawing set was projected to be 20 times larger than our other large projects. Because of the complexity of the project, the number of subcontractors working on concurrent projects and the distance between the jobsite and the jobsite office, we needed a way to make the current drawings available to everyone electronically. We use Egnyte as the backend storage and iPads in the field as the display device, assuring us that everyone in the field has access to the most current drawings and greatly reducing the risk of a subcontractor working off the wrong plans.”

Balfour Beatty initially selected Egnyte because of the security and control they had in setting up and managing folders. Implementation of Egnyte’s Local Cloud (ELC) was critical because accessing the drawings from the cloud was hampered by a slow Internet connection. By syncing a copy of the data behind the firewall and inside the network, they were able to eliminate need for more bandwidth to the Internet and increase the access speed to drawings. Pistor further noted, “Because ELC access was managed at the jobsite, we were able to use it for collaboration with our design team. The team members working with large 3D models were housed in our office and were able to store and share their files on the ELC even though they were all on their own company machines and did not have logins to our network. Our network security was maintained and the team was able to accomplish their need to exchange information quickly.”
About Egnyte’s Construction Vertical Market Initiative

Construction companies face unique problems when it comes to file access, sharing and storage. Whether it’s collaborating on extremely large drawing sets and blueprints, giving granular, highly controlled access to contractors, subcontractors and clients or accessing their files from remote jobsites using tablets and laptops, they need a solution that is easy to implement, easy to use and cost effective. Egnyte HybridCloud is designed to meet their needs. To learn more about Egnyte’s Construction VMI please visit us at http://www.egnyte.com/engineering-construction/