ISO 19650-Certified & Future-Ready: Soilbuild's Autodesk Construction Cloud's Powered Digital Journey

Key Benefits:

550+ active monthly users across the value chain – Soilbuild’s common data environment (CDE) now serves more than 550 users, including designers, subcontractors, and clients, ensuring everyone works from the same source of truth.
Improved collaboration and accountability – Centralising documents and workflows have eliminated version-control issues and provided real-time visibility into project status. These benefits are consistent with research showcasing the ability of CDEs to enhance collaboration, create a single source of truth, and reduce risk.
ISO-19650-ready workflows – Autodesk Construction Cloud’s (ACC) pre-configured naming conventions, containerisation, and permission settings provided a strong foundation that helped Soilbuild achieve ISO-19650 certification.

Laying the Foundation: Visionary Leadership Behind Soilbuilds's Digital Ambitions

Founded in 1976, Soilbuild Construction Group has built an award-winning portfolio across residential and industrial sectors. Under the dedicated leadership team, the company has embraced a future-ready mindset and has spearheaded the integration of 3D BIM, 4D scheduling, 8D health-and-safety modelling, and virtual reality into tender and execution processes. By developing data-rich BIM models, Soilbuild has been able to engage clients more effectively and strengthen its market position. This culture of innovation laid the groundwork for the company’s adoption of Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) and its broader digital transformation.

As an industry leader, Soilbuild recognised the imperative to evolve beyond traditional, manual processes to embrace a future-forward, digital-first approach. This strategic shift, catalysed by the adoption of ACC, has not only streamlined their operations but also empowered their workforce, culminating in significant industry recognition through ISO 19650 certification.

Figure 1. Aerial view of Soilbuild’s flagship project - an embodiment of modern construction excellence, showcasing the integration of design, digital workflows, and sustainable urban development.

Breaking the Cycle: Overcoming Manual Workflows and Data Silos

Before digitalisation, Soilbuild faced familiar industry pain points. Project information lived in disconnected systems and personal drives, making it difficult to track submission status or ensure that teams were working from current drawings. Without a common data environment (CDE), information exchange was manual and error-prone. Key challenges included:

Over-reliance on manual processes: In the past, Soilbuild, like the majority of the industry, relied heavily on manual inputs. From design coordination to material submissions, manual workflows made processes cumbersome. Tracking the status of submissions, approvals, and RFIs (requests for information) was a highly time-consuming effort that also inherently increased room for error.
Fragmented data and version control: With numerous stakeholders involved in every project – from design teams to subcontractors – effective coordination and communication was a persistent challenge. Information, such as drawings and submissions, often resided in disparate systems or depended on manual updates, leading to a lack of real-time clarity and outdated information being used, increasing the likelihood of mistakes.
Limited project visibility and accountability: Without a centralised system, tracking the health status of a project was difficult. This resulted in unclear responsibility and uncertainty in identifying bottlenecks when there were delays in essential aspects such as submissions or approvals.

Soilbuild embarked on its digitalisation journey with ACC in 2022, starting with a single project as a testbed. The objective was clear: to digitise workflows, reduce manual inputs, and gain better clarity on the status of the project. Soilbuild recognised that a digital overhaul was essential to remain competitive and in alignment with Singapore’s Construction Industry Transformation Map (ITM).

Single Source. Smarter Execution: How ACC Unified the Ecosystem

ACC was selected because it offers a secure CDE that centralises all graphical and non-graphical data. The solution's ability to provide a single source of truth was paramount, ensuring all stakeholders were accessing the latest approved information, thereby minimising errors. Autodesk research notes that a CDE enhances collaboration and reduces the need to manually recreate data. For Soilbuild, these advantages translated into:

Single source of truth: All plans, models, RFIs, and submittals are stored in ACC, ensuring teams access current and approved information, eliminating version conflicts.
Structured RFI and submittal workflows: Replacing spreadsheets and email threads with ACC's automated workflows provided immediate visibility into pending actions and response times, improving accountability. Engineers at Soilbuild reported that the digital process has reduced the time spent tracking RFIs by several hours each week.
Integrated meeting and issue management: By using ACC to set agendas, capture decisions, and assign follow-up actions, Soilbuild has reduced meeting durations and improved closure rates on site-related issues.
Digital Logistics: ACC enabled Soilbuild to digitise and unify its logistics planning and material coordination efforts. Data regarding material deliveries, on-site storage, and usage was consolidated into a single platform, providing a live view of material flows and reducing delays due to miscommunication. Furthermore, this digitisation of logistics helped Soilbuild avoid scheduling conflicts and material overstocking, optimising inventory management in the precast factory and on-site.
Digital safety management: With ACC, Soilbuild digitised its health and safety inspections, checklists, and incident reporting processes. This allowed site-safety officers to conduct real-time safety audits and log observations directly on-site via mobile devices, eliminating delays in reporting and ensuring immediate action on non-compliance.

Figure 2. Real-time Digital Logistics Dashboard in ACC: Soilbuild leverages data-driven insights to monitor fabrication, inspection, and delivery status across modules and levels, enabling better coordination, faster decision-making, and proactive supply chain management.

By streamlining previously disparate processes and unifying all related project information into a single platform, ACC has also enhanced Soilbuild’s visibility into the status of their various projects, facilitating better decision-making that positions them well for further digital-led growth.

While ACC served as the core platform, Soilbuild also leveraged its integration capabilities with other Autodesk partners to enhance the overall project experience. Soilbuild currently has approximately 550 active users on ACC each month. This figure not only includes Soilbuild's internal team but also their upstream and downstream stakeholders, demonstrating a value chain-wide transformation initiative where knowledge and best practices are being transferred across the ecosystem.

More Than Tools: How People, Process, and Platform Collectively Drove Sustainable Change

A cornerstone of Soilbuild's organisational transformation was its successful achievement of ISO 19650 certification. ISO-19650 is an international standard for managing information over the lifecycle of a built asset, requiring a CDE with unique identifiers for information containers, standard naming conventions, and data classification. ACC provided foundational elements that aligned seamlessly with ISO 19650’s requirements including pre-configured information containers, permission settings, and configurable metadata aligned closely with these requirements. According to Soe Min Tun, Senior IDD Manager of Soilbuild, this "pre-existing foundation" prepared Soilbuild for certification, leading to no significant gaps identified during the audit by the British Standards Institution (BSI), which is a testament to ACC's robust framework.

Figure 3. Soilbuild’s ISO 19650 workflow with ACC enabled features, such as naming conventions, metadata and verification gateways, enabled a smooth audit with zero gaps identified.

Beyond technology, success of digitalisation for Soilbuild hinged on change management. The adoption of ACC also fostered a significant shift in employee mindsets, with incremental implementation and clear demonstration of benefits proving crucial for driving change management. Despite initial resistance, Soilbuild's strategy of phased project rollouts, showcasing success stories, and providing hands-on coaching cultivated widespread buy-in. Engineers and coordinators quickly recognised practical benefits, such as reduced manual workload from eliminating the use of Excel sheets for RFI tracking or manual transmittal issuance.

Next Frontiers: AI and Analytics

Looking ahead, Soilbuild is committed to further leveraging ACC for its digital transformation journey. Key future milestones include:

Advanced Analytics: Soilbuild is collaborating with Autodesk as a beta user for the new 'Insight Builder' feature. This will enable them to extract data points from their ACC environment to create their own in-system dashboards, reducing reliance on third-party connectors and improving data-driven decision making.
Leveraging AI: Soilbuild also intends to expand its use of AI-driven inspection technologies across more projects, building on the success in their pilot projects. Furthermore, they are exploring robotics, drone-based site monitoring and digital-twin platforms to further enhance safety, quality, productivity, and efficiency across their project delivery lifecycle.

Soilbuild’s journey demonstrates how a clear vision, strong leadership, and the right digital tools can transform construction workflows. By adopting ACC and investing in employee training, the company has achieved measurable improvements in productivity and quality while earning ISO-19650 certification. With over 550 users accessing a single source of truth. Soilbuild has positioned itself as a leader in innovation and a model for others seeking to navigate digital transformation.