How the Eastern Freeway team unified planning across a major infrastructure project

The project

The Eastern Freeway Upgrades project is a large infrastructure upgrade project in Melbourne, Australia. One section of the project involves extensive improvements between Burke Road and Tram Road, including new express lanes, Melbourne's first dedicated busway, and a major interchange at Bulleen connecting to the North East Link tunnels.

When the entire North East Link project is complete, the upgraded freeway will reduce travel times by up to 35 minutes and remove 15,000 trucks from local roads daily.

The Eastern Freeway — Burke to Tram Alliance (EFBTA) is a partnership between Major Road Projects Victoria, construction contractors Laing O'Rourke and Symal, and designers Arcadis and WSP. 

We spoke with three key engineers across the alliance to understand how they're managing coordination on this complex, multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project.

The challenge of spreadsheets on major projects

Like many major infrastructure projects, the EFBTA team initially struggled with coordination across its many work zones and engineering disciplines.

Initially, the team used Excel spreadsheets to build out their lookahead plans. But as the project scaled, the team quickly ran into several challenges. 

As Nathan Lowe, Project Engineer for Symal, explains, the first problem was that Excel templates are easy to break. "We were using Excel templates, and they would break basically every day. We'd also struggle with finding the right formula to make the traditional formatting work."

This problem compounds when you layer in multiple teams, all working in slightly different ways. Stephen Frangolis, Senior Project Engineer with Laing O'Rourke, explains, “On a job of this scale, you'd end up with six different teams and everyone would be doing it differently."

This created significant visibility issues for project leadership. "It would be difficult for a senior manager to try to decipher their six different teams and how they're planning," adds Stephen.

A single source of truth

The alliance implemented Aphex to create a standardized approach to planning across the entire project, bringing the project’s delivery team out of disconnected spreadsheets and onto the same platform.  

As Nathan explains, "The collaborative workspace is one of the key aspects of why we took on Aphex initially.”

After a successful trial period, adoption spread throughout the project teams. Zack Yarák, Project Engineer for Symal, appreciates the consistent structure Aphex provides.

"With Aphex, we didn't have 10 different formatted spreadsheets that we had to make sense of—it was all in the same format in the same place.” 
_{Zack Yarák, Project Engineer for Symal}

Maps, boards, and lists

Stephen says the most useful part of Aphex is its flexibility. The platform allows for planning data to be visualised in maps, boards, and lists, which can all be customised with a click. 

"One of the greatest parts of Aphex is that you can view the same information in different formats. You can print off a one-page board view for a supervisor. You can also filter for resources and do high-level checks on how much materials you're bringing in."

Nathan agrees, adding that the map view has proved particularly useful for the Eastern Freeway team. The ability to visualize work areas and identify potential clashes has proven particularly valuable across the alliance.

"My favorite feature is definitely the map feature. It takes the second-guessing out of having to do a markup every single day for shift diagrams or sequences of works."

As he explains, the map has become central to the team's weekly coordination meetings.

"The map view is a vital aspect of weekly huddles, where we clash-detect the next couple of weeks of work. It prompts our engineers and supervisors to check what's happening on any given day or week to see whether the works are actually planned properly."
_{Nathan Lowe, Project Engineer for Symal}

Tracking project status

The team has also embraced status tracking features to improve accountability and provide better visibility to management.

As Zack explains, "The status tracking of the work has been picking up traction on our side. It helps our senior management get a quick oversight on what we've got done in the week, and if there is anything that didn't get done, you can get a high-level snippet as to what's delaying our work."

This data is increasingly valuable as the project continues, with the team planning to implement more advanced reporting through Power BI dashboards to analyze performance across all zones.

Aphex is also useful for resource management, as it helps give a project-wide view of resources required on a specific day.

“The resourcing aspect is great because we're now able to get certain histograms out of this to resource-load our program quite easily without having to do it clunkily in P6.”
_{Nathan Lowe, Project Engineer for Symal}

Daily usage drives improvements

Adoption continues to grow across the alliance, with many team members now using Aphex daily. The project's "Aphex champions" in each zone report frequently answering questions from engineers and construction managers as the platform becomes more central to project operations.

"My Aphex screen time would be quite high," Nathan admits. "I get at least three or four questions every day, whether from an undergraduate engineer or one of the construction managers."

What began as a new tool that people were initially reluctant to adopt has now become an essential part of their workflow. 

As Stephen says, “When we started, it was difficult to get the uptake at first. Now everyone sees the value in it. It’s been great to be able to propose improvements to Aphex and it’s great to see it implemented. You guys see value in what we see value in."

Nathan says that the responsiveness of the Aphex team has been a major factor in the uptake across the project. 

"If I contact the Aphex helpdesk, I'll get a response in less than a minute. Your team must be working 24/7. I don't know how you do it."
_{Nathan Lowe, Project Engineer for Symal}

The way forward

As construction progresses on the Eastern Freeway Upgrades, the EFBTA team continues to find new ways to leverage their collaborative planning approach. They're exploring advanced reporting capabilities and working to increase adoption among site supervision staff.

The team is unanimous in their assessment that returning to previous methods would be unthinkable.

As Nathan says, spreadsheets simply don’t work on major projects. "You can’t go back to spreadsheets on a project of this scale—you need something collaborative or else it all gets lost.”

Stephen agrees. "Aphex is the way forward.”