Founded in 1935, Khansaheb is a leading construction company in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). For over six years the company has been on a digitalisation journey led by Group IT Manager Matt Curson. During that time, the business moved 100% to the cloud with Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) as their core construction software.
The challenge
With its ACC integration, OpenSpace was an ideal fit for Khansaheb’s goal of centralizing data in one digital source of truth. So Matt’s team started a first proof of concept in 2022. “We did the first walk with OpenSpace on a newly awarded hospitality contract”, Matt says and they were immediately impressed. When Khansaheb was awarded a large refurbishment project for the Expo City, the team recognised the time saving potential OpenSpace could bring to the project right away.
Before starting work on the project, Khansaheb needed to conduct a condition survey to document the state of the facilities preconstruction—a huge task as the area includes 28 buildings. This is where OpenSpace became truly invaluable to the team.
The solution
While Matt thinks that “going digital” sounds like just another buzzword, he says it’s really about taking manual processes and optimizing them. “We would have walked around with smart phones, taken loads of images, uploaded them, made PDFs that don’t reference any drawings and don’t really have any time and date stamps, put together huge piles of reports, scanned them and issued them to the client which would have been tedious and ineffective.”
With OpenSpace Khansaheb had a small team walking the site with a 360° camera mounted on their hard hat. The result: about 180 captures, a seamless 360° digital view of the entire project and a very clear idea of the amount and type of potential issues. “That would have been done otherwise with mobile phones and copied into a PDF without any context really” says Matt.
To further facilitate reporting later on, the team documenting the issues via field notes were able to categorize them using pre-defined tags by discipline.
Hamish James is Contracts Manager on the project fit-out and has started to use OpenSpace for faster and more seamless creation of dilapidation schedules on three more projects since. “The fact that we can get a 360° view of everything is very, very helpful,” he says.
From preconstruction to automated progress tracking and facility management, there are clear benefits of rolling out OpenSpace further within the Khansaheb business in the future.
The results
Matt says that while they currently use OpenSpace primarily for the dilapidation survey, he and his team can already clearly see additional value of the solution. “The more people I show the system, the more use cases come up,” Matt says. “From preconstruction to automated progress tracking and facility management, there are clear benefits of rolling out OpenSpace further within the Khansaheb business in the future.”
The more people I show the system, the more use cases come up.
In fact, Hamish has already started using OpenSpace on more projects and is beginning to see the benefits for the team on site and in the office across use cases. He uses OpenSpace for progress tracking on a large-scale project split across 20 buildings. “Using OpenSpace we see quite quickly and more efficiently where we are in terms of progress on site,” Hamish says. On another project he is starting to leverage OpenSpace as a commercial management tool “to ensure we understand the works that our subcontractors have done so we can value that work more accurately than using traditional methods,” Hamish adds.
On the current refurbishment project Khansaheb has seen the following results:
Faster site documentation
Documenting this project seamlessly would have been close to impossible with a manual process—think tens of thousands of photos that would need to be linked to relevant notes, dates, and locations. OpenSpace captures 360° images passively while walking the site, meaning the team can focus on detecting issues and creating field notes that are automatically time stamped and pinned to the floor plan.
Easier and more transparent reporting
Because field notes are time stamped and marked by location and the team categorizes field notes based on disciplines, they can create and filter reports based on those criteria in just a few clicks and share with the client. For complete transparency, the client can also access the site via OpenSpace anytime and can virtually walk through the project, even going back in time.
A single source of truth
From captures to issue creation and reporting, OpenSpace data is readily available in one place and easy to navigate. The integration with Autodesk Construction Cloud further ensures that the data is held in one place and can be shared with relevant systems and uploaded to the Common Data Environment (CDE).
Risk mitigation
Capturing the entire site with the old, manual process would have taken the team a significant amount of time and distracted their focus from progressing the main works. “The condition survey completion would have been difficult, not fully detailed and locationally challenging to track. The risk and liability of Khansaheb being responsible for pre-existing defects would have been much higher without OpenSpace,” Matt says. With everything captured in OpenSpace, the team has objective data that can help mitigate potential disputes before they arise.
