2019Case20Jacobs

75 L EAN C ONSTRUCTION I RELAND A NNUAL B OOK OF C ASES 2019 Case 20 – Jacobs Jacobs leads the global professional services sector, providing solutions for a more connected, sustainable world. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with approximately US$12Billion in revenue and a talent force of more than 50000, Jacobs provides a ful l spectrum of services including scientific, technical, professional, construction and program management for business, industrial, commercial , government and infrastructure sectors. Marking 45 years in Ireland, Jacobs established its first international office in Ireland in 1974. Today, the company employs more than 1100 people across Dublin, Cork, and Belfast and is one of Ireland’s largest firms. C O M P A N Y W E B S I T E OVERVIEW & BACKGROUND TO THE LEAN INITIATIVE The Charter Jacobs’ offices span several continents, t ime zones , and di f ferent l ines of business (LOB). Traditional ly, this meant that each of f ice and LOB operated to their own standards using a variety of software systems. However, as this presented challenges to multi-office execution, Jacobs invested a significant amount of time and resources into standardising these software systems. This investment required significant upskilling to implement new software systems. As with any standardisation ini t iat ive, a program that ini t ial ly presented challenges has since afforded the broader group opportunities to mobilise resources from several offices to support large-scale project delivery. The standardi sat ion of sof tware systems has allowed each office and LOB to also standardise elements of design that were traditionally specific to them such as “Revit” families, e.g. pipes, l ights and equipment, with master cloud-based libraries used by each LOB. It i s on the back of thi s strategic improvement across the operation that Jacobs have been afforded opportunities to dramatically change and improve how we design projects. As a centre of excellence, the Irish operation over the past number of years has been given a charter to ‘pave the way towards a leaner digitised solution for project del ivery’ . A di srupt ive mindset across the Irish operation has enabled this charter, and this approach has been encouraged and supported by Chair and CEO Steve Demetriou and his senior management team, including Ireland’s management at local level. Without this support and the drive for innovation, the ask may have been too great. In parallel to project delivery, over the past number of years the Irish operation has also focused on this charter by enabling a Digitised Solutions Group (DSG) to focus on areas across our project del ivery which could be opt imi sed by digi t i sat ion and automat ion. Thi s case study i s a summary of the areas where we have optimised our execution strategy and project delivery. LEAN INITIATIVE UNDERTAKEN – LEAN THINKING, TOOLS, TECHNIQUES www.jacobs.com AUTHOR Karl Page Revit As the new standardised software across the LOBs, Revit afforded the DSG a platform upon which to build a digitised del ivery foundat ion. In compar i son to i ts predecessor “AutoCad”, Revit is a much more advanced system based on a 3D environment. As a 3D design tool in its basic form, Revit allows engineers to co-ordinate and gain an appreciation for the scale and complexity of the projects that we deliver. However, this is just one element of the benefits of using this Autodesk product. The DSG focused on other capabilities available and discerned that a much greater focus was needed on the data entry into the model. It is based on this data entry that the Autodesk suite is a truly powerful project delivery tool. Through other software add-ons to Revit, the data can be managed, mined, controlled and used as a lean delivery tool, providing quality assurance as a biproduct. Single Source of Truth To get an appreciation of the potential to digitise elements of design, the DSG initially focused on data entries and areas of duplication. Across all the disciplines, we found that Jacobs had a vast amount of data which was duplicated in some format. Different forms of data were recorded on decentralised storage locations and on a multitude of different software programmes. This meant that the data had no reference point and was open to inconsistent entries, leading to potential errors across the data. A further deep dive into the documentation presented single points of fai lure across the discipl ine design co- ordination, presenting the potential for errors to occur. To mitigate this potential issue, Jacobs developed robust quality procedures. However, as project schedules become more aggressive and the complexity and scale of the projects increase, these procedures would be stressed tested. Quality assurance COMPANY OVERVIEW