Challenge
Since 2013, Cottee Parker has been the lead architecture and design firm for one of Australia’s most-ambitious construction projects: Queen’s Wharf Brisbane, a nearly $4 billion mixed-use development in the Queensland capital. When finished in 2024, the complex along the Brisbane River will feature 12 football fields’ worth of public space, 2,000 apartments, 1,000 premium hotel rooms, 50 restaurants, as well as retail space, a 1,000-person ballroom and a casino.
But in the initial design stages of the project, Cottee Parker was still using a paper-based process. This presented Cottee Parker with a number of challenges, primarily a complicated quality assurance (QA) process, where manually marked-up documents had to be distributed to team members in different locations—both on Queen’s Wharf’s expansive jobsite and throughout Cottee Parker’s multiple offices across Australia.
Solution
Cottee Parker’s transition to Bluebeam Revu has allowed it to digitize thousands of project documents, streamlining and improving the firm’s QA process. Additionally, its use of Studio Projects and Sessions has enabled the approximately 50 team members working on Queen’s Wharf to simultaneously update documents from different locations in real-time. These developments have led to a vastly more efficient process than its previous paper-based workflow, as well as better overall accountability and productivity thanks to the decreased risk of error.
Benefits
- As many as 5,000 documents per month are now digital across the 50 team members, resulting in a substantial cost saving.
- Accessing the same set of markups simultaneously has allowed Cottee Parker’s architects to more easily manage the scale of Queen’s Wharf and respond to change.
- Since switching to a digital environment, the company estimates that it has cut its time spent reviewing and approving documents by 50%.
