Shawmut Construction enables real-time collaboration with DryvIQ’s hybrid solution

Customer Profile

Shawmut Design and Construction is a national construction management firm that builds structures across a wide variety of industries. Including academic, retail, restaurant, commercial, healthcare, life sciences, hotels, spas, and health clubs, and sports venues. Headquartered in Boston, MA, this billion-dollar company has the distinction of being 100% employee-owned. Shawmut also has offices in West Springfield, MA as well as New York, Providence, Las Vegas, North Haven, and Los Angeles.

Business Drivers

Shawmut’s employee-owners consider its strongest and most important business driver to be the exceptional level of quality and customer service it delivers to its clients. It puts expert talent on each project and relies on rock-solid execution of processes and communication between all stakeholders. As a result, Shawmut builds projects that are not only of outstanding quality but are also on-time and on budget.

The Challenge: A ShareFile Sync to Autodesk

The construction projects Shawmut is hired to do are typically large and complex, frequently requiring on-site construction management for months and often years to complete. Each one has an enormous number of moving parts and interdependencies. The process involves keeping track of a tremendous quantity of design, construction, and project management-related documents—blueprints, 3D drawings and renderings, material orders, submittals, project assignment docs, punch-lists, financial and budget information as well as myriad quality control, safety, inspection, and compliance-related documentation.

On any large project, Shawmut superintendents like Joseph Lombardi are at the helm. So to help him and his team manage the complex matrix of tasks and information, Joe selected Autodesk’s® premier on-site mobile construction management application, BIM 360™ Field. “This is a really exciting tool,” explained Joe. “What BIM 360 does is put everything I need right at my fingertips on an iPad that I can use anywhere on the job site. However, we also needed to easily collaborate. So for that, Shawmut chose Citrix’s Sharefile® cloud platform.”

“We needed to find a way to accelerate the automatic distribution and update of documents out of Autodesk BIM 360. And get them in the cloud so that everyone could have the latest information as close to real-time as possible. Plus, we needed very specific access control. The right information needed to flow to just the right hands.” Joe explained. “Making this a reality and without any hiccups or delays was a huge challenge.”

The bottom line is DryvIQ makes BIM 360 even more valuable to an organization like Shawmut.
Joe Lombardi, Superintendent

The Solution

To help Joe Lombardi and his team make their BIM 360 solution perform at optimal efficiency, Autodesk introduced them to DryvIQ, an innovative and highly effective distribution product. “The folks at DryvIQ knew exactly what we were up against,” explained Joe. “The Autodesk people had previously asked them to build an interface that tightly integrates DryvIQ to BIM 360. The combined solution was tailor-made to address our specific document control challenges.”

Joe then downloaded a DryvIQ trial and had it installed and operating the same day. “What was fantastic was the idea that even though I’m not an IT guy, that I was able to get this up and running in such a short time. It was extremely easy to understand and deploy,” said Joe. “What DryvIQ does is take one of the industry’s most powerful tools; Autodesk BIM 360, and provides the ability to distribute data faster and more efficiently. You point and click, set up rules and permissions and it just works. Data just flys in and out of BIM 360 without us even thinking about it. DryvIQ automatically keeps the file organization and versioning on our local drive, in the cloud, and on Autodesk synchronized together flawlessly. Plus, if you want to make a change, it’s just a few clicks and you’re done,” described Joe.

The Results

In conclusion, the hybrid solution of Autodesk BIM 360 Field, Citrix Sharefile, and DryvIQ gave Shawmut the powerful construction site management capability and iPad-based mobility they needed to continue to deliver quality work and customer service it’s known for. Furthermore, DryvIQ decreased upload, processing, and data distribution time by over 96%, delivering mission-critical information to the right hands in virtually real-time after publishing.

“Helping us get it done right is what this solution is doing. I don’t have to worry that someone has the wrong version of a document. DryvIQ puts it there.” said Joe. “The fact is that this solution saves us real-time and real money. It reduces the project management time spent on document management, significantly allowing it to be managed easily by one project manager. Which results in better value and potential savings to our clients over the course of a long project. The bottom line is DryvIQ makes BIM 360 even more valuable to an organization like Shawmut.”

Exceptional service from DryvIQ

“I really can’t say enough about the way DryvIQ treats its customers,” commented Joe. “It’s pretty fantastic. We downloaded DryvIQ and their tech people set up an online meeting to show us how the program worked as well as a few neat tricks. Literally within a few hours, we had BIM 360 fully synchronized to our Cloud account. They made us feel important as customers from the get-go. That really sold us on the way DryvIQ does business. Every step of the way, their priority is to make us happy.”