During COVID-19, the team had to adopt many changes. The limited staff on-site highlighted new health & safety issues and organisational changes in the way they were addressed. At the same time, the flexibility to work at any time and from any location thanks to Thinkproject enabled team members to use a different task completion cadence which led to faster workflows and better use of resources. There were important time savings perceived due to the digital resolution of the review and approval processes, information exchange and approval, but no comparison was done to be able to deduct a sound metric. Time savings were also recorded due to the limited travelling which is possible due to the use of digital solutions. DEGES perceives up to 30% of regular travelling time for similar projects is reduced. This means a good impact on the environment, given the reduction in the CO2 emissions.

Travel impact

For Stellingen Tunnel, less travel was required for all participants. 5 persons from DEGES and 15 from construction supervision/site management at 290 km, 310 km and ~50 km respectively, 2 times per week for 75 weeks:

5 x 290 km x 2 x 75 x 0.3 = 65,250 km
5 x 3.5 x 2 x 75 x 0.3 = 800 hours
15 x 310 km x 2 x 75 x 0.3 = 209,250 km
15 x 4h x 2 x 75 x 0.3 = 2700 hours

Time savings allowed DEGES GmbH personnel to be more efficient, handling more tasks, supervising more projects, and all this with an increased quality of the final work. Not only did the project save time in travelling and in completing workflows digitally at any time of the day, the use of digital solutions across all the organisations involved in the project allowed also for exceptional paper savings.

Digitised information and digital workflows impact

Paper is used at different critical moments in the project, during design phase for the discipline coordination, design reviews, internal approvals, approvals with the owner and the engineer, final signatures; minutes of meetings at the site which have to be approved and signed; inspection forms and non-conformance reports; change forms and approvals; material bills; logistic calendar for equipment and material delivery; all internal coordination papers we all take with us in meetings for review; etc.

Stellingen Tunnel and the initial set of drawings from the Heumar Interchange:

• Drawings were part of a complex set of workflows, if we consider only the two main ones, each of them with several steps (23 and 15 respectively), reviewers and final signatures (10 and 11), and considering 35% could have been printed at the site, we have 28 million sheets in total.
• The estimated number of sheets across all the above, lead us to 28 million of papers were not printed. The direct environmental impact gave the following results:

Saved: 2069 trees | 159 million litres of water | 70 tons of CO2 by not printing

Mr. Vollmer himself states he does not print paper anymore. He assures that digitalisation does not just end at the owner side, and that it goes across all stakeholders and throughout the asset life cycle. DEGES requires their general contractors to use digital tools whenever possible to ensure the project/asset is completed in a digital manner, ensuring a smooth handover and with all the necessary information for the asset during O&M.

A digital model of the built asset would enable DEGES to increase the control over what is built and how. Looking at a contract for example, there we could include not only the EIR when we talk about BIM but also environmental KPIs related to the materials used, with the eyes set on the circular economy and recycling. Mr. Vollmer believes that this could be achieved in the medium term and that this would also allow for a more transparent model of sharing additional expenses and strains as well as gains. In other words, a more cooperative and partnership-based approach to contracts.

Costs are not the ultimate purpose, tracking the source and type of materials is very important and it is likely to be included soon in contract requirements. DEGES as the project manager has a huge responsibility on how the asset is built, looking for the least negative impact on the environment, therefore planning carefully, making use of the most advanced digital tools.