Using Aphex, the Eastern Busway Alliance has enabled their team to be more productive, prevent duplication, and generate deeper insights from their GIS.
The project
The Eastern Busway project is a key part of the Auckland region’s rapid transport network. By 2028 the busway will carry 18,000 passengers per day, more than four times the 3,700 bus passengers carried per day prior to 2020.
The project is being designed and constructed by the Eastern Busway Alliance (EBA) of Auckland Transport with Fletcher, ACCIONA, AECOM and Jacobs. The EBA also partners with mana whenua to ensure that Māori cultural values and perspectives are recognised and integrated into the planning of each stage of the project.
We spoke with the EBA Geospatial Specialist, Amit Kokje, to understand the communication challenges faced by a project of this scale, and how Aphex and its GIS integration have saved the project time and money.
The cost of getting on the same page
As with other major transport projects, communication is an important part of the construction of the Eastern Busway. It ranges from clear engagement with elected representatives, stakeholders and the community to internal messaging with the hundreds of professionals on the project team.
On the Eastern Busway project, Aphex has played a key role in streamlining the internal communications and short term planning process.
Before using Aphex, the EBA team were required to prepare specific reports and updates for Auckland Transport (the project client), each zone team, the Customer and Community team, and the interface leads in a time consuming process
Although the EBA team used GIS software to help manage the project, planning data was not readily available as there were no location geometries associated in a native form for the project team. This made it difficult to track progress for short term planning.
"Immensely helpful"
The EBA team introduced Aphex to help align all workstreams. With Aphex, engineers are able to update their plans and view the progress of other teams in real time.
With short term planning data in one place, internal communication has become easier. Instead of creating several reports for different purposes, the team is able to create a bespoke view in Aphex.
"Aphex is proving immensely helpful because it enables everyone to visualise the overlapping work areas during the briefing," says Amit Kokje.
A real time map
The breakthrough for Amit and his team was the integration with ArcGIS. This has enabled teams working in the field to use the latest geospatial data, including raster imagery of the work site, alongside their short term plan.
Teams in the EBA use Aphex’s mapping tool to mark up work areas onto map views integrated from their GIS. This data is then imported back into EBA ArcGIS App, enabling the GIS team to also have a real time view of the project.
The team took advantage of the Aphex API to extract this information, and have then used ETL solutions like FME to transform the information to be imported back into their GIS environment.
By making data from Aphex available in their GIS, the team have been able to create data visualisations and perform more complex operations on the Aphex data.
More productive meetings
Another benefit of the GIS integration is that it has enabled project teams to run more effective meetings.
Projecting the live map view from Aphex during meetings ensures that everyone has a clear view of the project going forward, helping to highlight any potential conflicts.
As Project Engineer Jeniffer Lourdsamy says, “Using Aphex, we've cut down on the administrative burden of our meetings and streamlined communication, so we can focus more on getting the job done.
"Meetings with internal and external teams are now more productive because everyone is working from a shared visualisation of the plan."
Business as usual
Aphex has become a BAU tool for the EBA team.
"Construction project engineers are using the Aphex GIS dashboard and Aphex Planner in their daily briefings. Meetings have become more productive, and Aphex enables everyone to understand the dependencies, any problem areas and mitigation work" says Amit Kokje.
With construction continuing into 2027, we look forward to working with the EBA team on this transformative project for Auckland.
