Tracking project progress at Devonport Terminal 3 with Aphex

The Devonport Terminal 3 project is a critical infrastructure upgrade for Tasmania's vital maritime connection to mainland Australia, designed to accommodate Spirit of Tasmania's new vessels traversing the Bass Strait.

Delivered by Principal Contractor BMD Constructions, the project spans landside and marine works. It includes civil infrastructure for car parks, buildings, freight marshalling areas, ticketing booths and services installation, all delivered in a highly coordinated environment with multiple subcontractors working in close proximity.

We spoke with BMD Construction Coordinator Clare McKellar about how Aphex has supported the project’s short-term planning and subcontractor coordination.

Supporting more connected short-term planning

Across the industry, delivery teams often rely on Excel spreadsheets for four-week lookaheads and physical whiteboards for daily planning.

As Clare explains, “While this approach is widely used across the industry, it can be time-consuming to maintain and may limit real-time visibility across teams. Without a single integrated source of truth, updates can become fragmented, particularly when multiple contributors are planning concurrently.

“As a result, you could end up with different versions of the lookahead across the team."

One engineer might plan their works one way, while another sequences it differently. With Excel, those changes aren’t automatically reconciled, so aligning plans takes additional coordinated effort.
_{Clare McKellar, Construction Coordinator}

Implementing Aphex for collaborative planning

Seeing these challenges in other projects, the BMD team at Devonport brought in Aphex. This gave them a single, connected plan for the construction delivery team, one that everyone involved in the project could access.

Clare uses Aphex daily, spending anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes reviewing and understanding how everything is coming together. The ability to filter, change views, and see clear sequencing relationships has been particularly valuable.

This has been particularly valuable as the landside works have expanded to include four subcontractor groups operating together.

The team established a structured routine around Aphex.

• Engineers complete daily reviews of the plan
• Supervisors attend a daily pulse meeting to review their tasks
• Weekly catch-ups are held to review the six-week plan
• Relevant planning information is shared with the client to support visibility of upcoming works

The Aphex Map and Board views became central to these meetings, replacing the physical whiteboards that had previously dominated planning sessions.The Aphex map and board views became central to these meetings, replacing the physical whiteboards that had been previously used in planning sessions.

"Having everything in one place makes a real difference, because people don't have to open multiple apps on their laptop," Clare explains.

Relevant planning information has also supported clearer visibility for TT-Line, helping the project team communicate upcoming works, inspections and key activities.

The value of intelligent sequencing

For Clare, one of the most valuable aspects of Aphex is the intelligent sequencing and linking of tasks, compared to Excel-based lookaheads.

This capability has improved planning quality by surfacing the assumptions behind task dependencies. For example, highlighting when an unexpected lag has been introduced between activities.

What I like most is that if one activity changes, the rest of the schedule updates automatically. It makes it much easier to see how tasks connect, identify issues quickly and understand why the work is planned in that order
_{Clare McKellar, Construction Coordinator}

Looking ahead

As the project progresses, the team continues to explore additional Aphex features to further enhance their planning processes, such as milestones and daily checklists. 

Clare’s advice for other projects considering Aphex is straightforward:

“Spend time at the start to think about what you want it to look like and what you're trying to achieve from it. Get the right people in the room when you're doing the planning so people can think about their inputs and what kind of structure it needs to take."