Engineering and Construction in the Digital Era

Clough is a pioneering engineering and construction company with operations spanning over 100 years. With a legacy of this tenure, comes a culture and history of adapting to new ways of working and adopting new technologies for the efficient delivery of projects.

As part of Clough’s digital strategy, we have recently implemented Building Information Modelling (BIM) technology and processed into our projects.

BIM is a virtual process and technology that combines all aspects, disciplines, and systems of an asset across its lifecycle from planning, through to design, construction and operations, all within one single virtual model.

Simply put, BIM is the creation of a digital version of projects, encompassing both the physical and functional qualities of it.

The use of BIM allows all functions to collaborate more accurately and efficiently than other traditional processes.

Clough wanted to improve on the way that projects aligned designs to construction. And although BIM is often associated more with design and preconstruction, we’ve been able to see the benefits of using BIM through every phase of the project, even after construction is complete.

Now, Clough isn’t the first to implement BIM, it’s been used widely in architecture and engineering for over 20 years now, but its use in construction has only just begun to gain momentum in the past five years. At Clough, BIM has allowed us to implement a ‘digital-first approach’ on our projects. This mean, we are able to ‘rehearse’ the planning and construction of facilities before we send our teams out into the field to bring projects to life.

We’re already seeing the benefits with our clients, by putting digital models into the hands of the entire project team, we’re able to accelerate reviews and identify and resolve clashes earlier and in real time.

On one of our current projects, we’ve been overlaying our BIM model with timelapse footage from the project site to track and showcase the team’s progress. To do this, we use a geolocated BIM model and align it with the camera coordinates to overlay it in place.

This has been a fantastic tool to market our capabilities as business to clients as well as promote the work our project teams are doing on site.

Bringing any new approach to construction requires a change in culture, but there is power in harnessing the use of new technologies, as we know that digital transformation is only accelerating.

With the growing use of BIM across the industry, it will soon become the norm. BIM is as much about process as it is about technology, and as digitalisation of processes and new technologies develop across the construction industry, Clough will continue to adopt new practices to optimise the delivery of projects for its clients.