How Costain, VINCI used lookahead planning to save £990K
Two years after adopting a then, brand new short term planning system in Aphex, Tideway and its delivery partners joined forces with the University of Edinburgh to understand the real impact of the investment.
Note: This is an excerpt from the report produced by the research team from University of Edinburgh, Tideway, and their delivery partners.
Thames Tideway in a Nutshell
Costain, VINCI Construction Grands Projets and Bachy Soletanche (CVBJV) are the Tideway Delivery Partners for the East Section of the 25km long Thames Tideway Tunnel - London’s newSuper Sewer. When open, the sewer will prevent the tens of millions of tonnes of pollution that currently pollute the River Thames ever reaching the river.
The Research and Findings
In 2021, Carolina Toczycka, PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh undertook research with CVBJV with the goal to understand the impact, if any, of the Aphex system on their team and project performance. Overall, the implementation of Aphex exceeded expectations for CVBJV with the project realising the following benefits;
Project benefits of £990,000 to June 2021 with an expected additional £925,000 of benefit possible had the software been implemented from project commencement. This resulted in a Return on Investment of 7.6:1. With around a third of the impact being real financial cost savings and the remainder as quantified efficiencies.
The project quantified benefits driven by;
Reduction of Claims: The project identified that objective performance records generated by Aphex reduced claim impact by around 5%
Planning Efficiency: Team coordination meetings were able to be reduced to around just 30 mins, resulting in an estimated £167,000 of efficiency savings
Increased Accountability: The use of decentralised planning increased the level of accountability in front line leaders and managers. This resulted in better and more efficient plans that saved programme duration,
Reduced “Firefighting”: Clear visibility of plans and objectives across the entire team, with reduced reactive activities, or fire fighting, as a consequence of the right people being notified at the right time valued at £170,000
Information Availability: The ability of the system to hold in one place all project plans and targets as well as the information required to deliver those plans resulted in 4 to 5 hours a week in time saved across key roles
To learn more about how the CVBJV team implemented Aphex you can access the research paper here.
