How Lokhorst Improved Construction Quality with Digital Document Management

Founded in 1934, Lokhorst, a Netherlands-based contracting firm, focuses primarily on the construction, renovation, and maintenance of various clients across the utility, commercial, and social sectors. One of Lokhorst’s primary goals has been to go paperless and maintain its Level 5 Sustainability rating. They wanted to increase efficiency in their delivery process and reduce the headaches that many project stakeholders felt in issue reporting and resolution. With the implementation of BIM 360 within Autodesk Construction Cloud™, Lokhorst eliminated paper-based systems, accelerated the speed of reporting, and reduced issue resolution time by 46%.

46%

reduction in issue resolution time

Digitise and Automate Project Management Workflows

A paper-based QA system created a complicated workflow, leading to several inefficiencies and frustrations for managing issues. Lokhorst had previously used an outside QA firm to help them manage these processes, which required finding and printing the appropriate issue logging forms, having them filled out by hand in the field, then entering the information into Excel. This was a cumbersome process that made it difficult to manage issues promptly, creating frustration with colleagues, subcontractors, and most importantly, clients.

“We needed to digitize and automate our workflows from paper into the cloud. We have a lot of hard copy forms that were not being tracked properly, and the process was more complicated than it needed to be leading to loss of information and rework.”

– Arjan Peeters, Manager Virtual Construction

Lokhorst choose BIM 360 for Digital Document Management to Improve Workflow

Lokhorst’s team chose BIM 360 for document management due to its ease of use and the fact that they could work within a single platform, keeping all their forms and data in one place.

To address the problems and complexities created by paper-based workflows, Lokhorst put a form in BIM 360 as a checklist so that every room in the building could be checked for flaws, mistakes, and defects efficiently and effectively. The connectivity of BIM 360 eliminated the need to sync, keeping all data live and up to date.

Project managers and subcontractors would use smart devices to access the forms for reporting issues in BIM 360, simplifying reporting and issue management. This approach also allowed teams to include digital photos of the issues, so contractors knew precisely where to go and what to do. Having a digital system also increased the signoff and handover process, giving clients complete visibility into projects.

Construction Quality Improves as Adoption Increases

Eliminating paper forms made project management workflows much more efficient, reducing the time required to resolve issues by 46%. It also made resolving them much easier:

No more hunting down the right forms
No legibility issues with handwritten forms often filled out in rainy conditions
No more Excel and decentralised issues
Better issue resolution with photos
One-stop project overview in a unified platform

Throughout the implementation process, Autodesk’s team worked alongside Lokhorst to smooth out bumps and make the best use of the technology’s document management capabilities. Lokhorst is now using BIM 360 on all future projects and mandates their subcontractors also use it in their contracts.