How Spark NEL streamlined and improved their daily communication with Aphex

The Project

The Northeast Link (NEL) is Victoria’s largest road project — and is currently the largest infrastructure partnership in Australia. When finished, it will connect the M80 with the Eastern Freeway, linking key growth areas in the north and southeast.

The road is estimated to take 15,000 trucks off local roads daily, reducing commuter travel times by up to 35 minutes.

Spark NEL manages the project, and is a joint venture that includes Webuild, CPB, GS Engineering & Construction and China Construction Oceania. As of writing, the project is in the process of using two Tunnel Boring Machines — named Zelda & Gillian after local legends — to bore and lay twin tunnels stretching 6.5km from Watsonia to Bulleen.

We spoke with Karim Hussein, Senior Project Engineer on the Northern Surface Works (NSW) section of the project, about how his project team have used Aphex to move away from physical whiteboards and use Aphex’s Board view for their daily engineering team meetings.

The limitations of physical whiteboards

Like most construction projects, the Spark NEL NSW team runs daily update meetings, using physical whiteboards to track tasks and visualise project timelines.

The problem? During meetings, the team would also provide updates that would lead to changes to the plan. Typically, these updates would be added to the whiteboard and manually transferred to the project’s overall plan.

This process could be time-consuming and prone to human error. Important updates might be missed or inaccurately recorded, leading to potential inconsistencies between the whiteboards and the official project plans.

The team also used different whiteboards for different meetings, adding another layer of complexity to the process. Information often needed to be updated across several boards, increasing the risk of repeated or conflicting data.

Fragmented sources of truth

Another problem with physical whiteboards is that information related to specific tasks, such as labour and resourcing, was often contained in multiple disparate spreadsheets.

This made it difficult to relay accurate information during meetings, as team members needed to cross-reference many different sources of truth.

The lack of a single, unified source of information increased the likelihood of errors and miscommunication, making it challenging to maintain a clear overview of the project.

The digital whiteboard

To address these challenges, the NSW team started using the Board view in Aphex. This fully customisable digital whiteboard draws from real-time data in the team's single, connected plan in Aphex.

This means that the whiteboard in the team’s daily update meetings always draws from the most accurate source of data. The Board view can include fields such as blockers, location, packages, resourcing, subcontractors, and more.

With the help of the team at Aphex, the NSW team was able to build out a customised whiteboard view, allowing the team to focus on specific aspects of the project depending on the meeting’s agenda.

These customised views could be saved and quickly applied, helping to streamline discussions and ensure their meetings were focused and efficient.

Talking around the Board view makes the daily catch-ups way simpler. The plan is so much clearer for the site teams. Plus, everything is linked to the overall program, so nothing gets missed, and I don’t spend ages updating my lookaheads when changes are made.
_{Tony Sun, NSW Senior Project Engineer}

The single, connected plan

The biggest benefit of Aphex’s Board view is that any changes automatically flow through to the plans used by the team’s engineers, including any changes to task status and resourcing adjustments.

This eliminated the need for manual updates and reduced the risk of errors, ensuring that the information on the whiteboard was always current and reliable.

The key advantage of this change was its ability to synchronise with the team’s Gantt charts in real time. Any changes made during meetings were instantly updated across the entire plan.

With the site team providing daily updates to their plan, the NSW zone leads were able to see the source of truth from the ground up. So, when it came to their weekly lookahead meetings, the right conversations could be had, and any adjustments made would be captured across the plan instantly, negating the risk of double handling of information.

Fewer mistakes and faster meetings

The switch to the digitized whiteboard has provided the NSW engineering team with a more effective tool for managing their daily meetings.

This has led to more accurate and efficient communication across the project — at a time when communication is pivotal to maintaining key construction milestones.

Since setting up different whiteboard views across the team, we’ve managed our daily meetings much more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Plus, I can rest easy knowing that our plan is always updated, and no changes are being missed!
_{‍Karim Hussein, Senior Project Engineer.}