Digital innovation
VolkerFitzpatrick is focused on being a sustainable high value construction company enabled by modern technology and data driven decision making.
Powered by data - driven by people
Tomorrow Now is our programme which embraces digital construction and innovative solutions to enable data driven decision making. It keeps our team focused on understanding the current challenges and looking ahead to what may be needed in the future. The team’s best ideas are piloted to prove their benefits and subsequently the most suitable ones are scaled across the business. We are seeing the real operational benefits that come from creating new applications and embedding technological changes across our business. We are fulfilling our aspiration to be ‘powered by data, driven by people’, which means using digital tools to shape mindsets as well as techniques.
Harnessing digital construction and innovation
The group's digital construction programme focuses everyone and drives improvements through the production of digital plans and a digital toolbox. This toolbox enables innovations to be shared across the businesses, as it brings together key solutions with known benefits in one place. It is used alongside our digital challenge process where we review project and team requirements and then provide a select suite of technologies for each project.
Dedicated digital specialists
We have created VolkerVisuals, a network of specialists dedicated to supporting projects to better visualise and manage construction delivery and logistical issues. It has supported over 100 tenders and projects to date, improving the understanding of project delivery across all engagement at all levels. On top of this, our bespoke interactive game, VolkerWorld, lets users play the role of a site management team facing a range of challenging situations.
Innovations in action
On our University Station Birmingham project, the team used Asite cloud collaboration for design and document management. Building Information Management (BIM) enabling platforms were used to develop the design in a fully federated 3D model, and a 4D platform we used to carry out project planning. All of this enabled the project to carry out digital rehearsals for the erection of the concrete frame of the new building in planned weekend and night closures of the railway. In addition to being used for clash detection, the federated model enabled close collaboration across the team, both in terms of progressive assurance and coordination between the works packages.