The VDC team at Fortis Construction just told one of the best construction stories we’ve heard in a long time. If you missed the live Q&A, we pulled the whole thing together for you in both a sharable document and a video recording with their project executive and VDC team.

To appreciate the story, let's start with the project itself: A 150MW hyperscale data center in Singapore. Because of land scarcity there, they built it 11 stories high. Those 11 levels included dense MEP stacked vertically, with almost no room to spare. Then, the constraints piled on:

• A schedule compressed from three years to roughly 18 months
• More than 2,000 design changes
• A major cooling redesign, mid-build, that turned the job from a storage data center into an AI data center
• A team spread across 17 countries, speaking 11 different languages

That massive team had to coordinate the same impossibly dense building, under a schedule most teams would say was nearly impossible.

Yet, they finished about three months early.

→ Hear how they did it. Watch the recording

The BIM process to repeat for early delivery

The scale of the data center is impressive, but it’s not the reason we wanted to share this story.

A team that fragmented, on a project that complex, would normally drown in back-and-forth between different trades, different languages, different pictures in their heads of what the building actually was. As Project Exec Todd Andersen puts it, there was no common language of understanding. Everyone pictured a different building inside their mind's eye.

So they built a new way to review.

Instead of one person flying a model while everyone else took notes, Fortis got the right people into the model together at full scale: Superintendents., trades, the design team, and the owner’s facilities group. Each one catches a different kind of problem, and on this job, they caught them while the design was still flexible and fixes were still cheap.

The result was a shift in how fast decisions happened. Back-and-forth indecision turned into decisions the team could make and sign off the same day. That is the pattern we think most VDC teams can learn from.

→ Get the full breakdown in the case study (PDF).

Case Study: How Fortis Delivered a Massive Data Center Early

Read Now

A complex project made possible with Resolve

There is more in the conversation than we can fit here, but a few moments stood out:

• The first time a skeptic put on the headset and realized a 20-foot ceiling actually is 20 feet
• Hardarshan Singh walking through the telecom cable crisis, where tens of millions of dollars of fiber had already been bought off a half-finished design and could not move
• VDC Manager Gizelle Grace Ambasan on how the team sped up decisions
• Todd on why getting it right the first time is the critical step to building at speed

The number that made it worth it: 88X ROI

By reviewing the building before they built it, the team caught installation and access risks that would have cost weeks and millions on site. Fortis' team analyzed their results, they found an 88X return on their investment in Resolve.

If you lead VDC or BIM, this is worth hearing about.

→ Watch the full webinar recording
→ Download the Fortis case study (PDF)

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