BMB JV Planners cut weekly update times in half with Aphex
London’s sewer system was constructed over 150 years ago for a population less than half its current size. As a result, millions of tonnes of untreated sewage spills into the River Thames each year. Tideway is constructing a £4.2bn ‘super sewer’, a 25km tunnel under London that will intercept, store and transfer sewage waste.
Upon completion this will prevent tens of millions of tonnes of sewerage pollution overflowing into the River Thames every year.
The BAM Nuttall, Morgan Sindall, Balfour Beatty joint venture is delivering the 7km west section of the tunnel.This section runs from Acton in West London to Wandsworth in South West London and incorporates seven separate work sites along the route.
Acton Storm Tanks
Acton Storm Tanks is the most western site on theTideway project incorporating a pumping station and six storm tanks. The project involves intercepting the existing Victorian trunk storm sewer overflow and constructing a 33m deep shaft where Rachel, one of the scheme’s six tunnel boring machines, will be received after completing the main tunnel drive from Carnwath Road in Fulham.
Michelle’s Story
Michelle Murphy is a Section Engineer responsible for the delivery of the Acton Storm Tanks project.Like many other construction engineers, Michelle did the absolute best she could with the tools avail-able and used spreadsheets to manage her critical lookahead and coordination planning on a weekly basis.
Her plans were what the entire Acton Storm Tanks site ran on from communication to supervision of the work crews and across other teams on TidewayWest. During the week, as the complex work progressed, Michelle would go to the extent to track any issues that may come up or cause delay by listing them in a separate spreadsheet.
“Aphex has halved the time I spend every week updating the plan.”
Since she’s started using Aphex, Michelle has halved the time it takes to update her lookahead, “compared to Aphex's automatic updates and simple click-and-drag interface, working on Microsoft Excel was far more time-consuming and tedious!”
Aphex has also changed the way Michelle tracks delay on her site. When a delay is recorded, instead of manually typing long causes for delay on spread-sheets, Michelle is prompted by the Smart Status feature which automatically identifies delays and prompts the allocation of root causes.
“Aphex is not only enabling a more collaborative way of working, it’s driving efficiency gains by digitising tedious recurring processes and giving me more time to focus on meeting key project milestones.”
