Earlier this year, ArchTam created and launched an interactive web-based tool called the Virtual Consultation Room, which enables our clients around the world to engage and consult interested stakeholders from their computer or mobile device, simulating the community meeting experience in a virtual environment. In addition to providing a safer environment for participation during the coronavirus pandemic, the Virtual Consultation Room creates a more flexible and inclusive approach to community engagement. This tool allows our clients to reach a wider audience — beyond those who might be able to attend traditional in-person meetings — including those with physical limitations.

In the past six months, our Virtual Consultation Room platform was visited more than one million times. We have had the pleasure of working with top clients across the globe with an outstanding, 100 percent customer satisfaction rating, including from clients such as the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy, Public Health England, the City of San Diego, Highways England, Roche, Georgia Department of Transportation, among others.

“The Virtual Room was simple and fast to deliver. It gave us an easy-to-implement solution to meet challenging and unforeseen circumstances. Yet at the same time there was the opportunity to flex the product so it better suited our needs. A big benefit for us was that it didn’t slow down the timing of the consultation, or our overall project programme. You were able to mobilise the product quickly and efficient in delivery.” – Melissa Williams, Senior Communications Manager, Highways England

Through the new platform, clients can curate a virtual stakeholder engagement event to show consultation materials including virtual reality and sound demonstrations, videos, maps, plans and pop-up banners, just as people would experience at an in-person engagement. There is also a chat function for on-hand experts to remotely answer questions as visitors view the materials, further simulating what would happen at an in-person event. The tool allows for instant feedback, so public comments can be captured and saved for analysis, and to ensure accurate reporting.

“I’m delighted to announce that Roche was the first company in Ireland to use innovative virtual consultation technology to share plans for the decommissioning of its Clarecastle site with the public. The technology, developed by ArchTam , enabled us to display a series of information boards about the project in a dynamic virtual room and undertake live chats with the public.” – Gerry Cahill, Roche Managing Director/ Site Head, Ireland

Prior to the global pandemic, digital tools were already featured heavily during ArchTam’s in-person community engagement events — including 360-degree Virtual Reality (VR), visualizations, sentiment mapping, sound demonstrations and interactive apps — so the logical next step was to bring them all together into one digital platform.

The adoption of digital tools and processes has differentiated ArchTam from its peers in the sector and helped us work faster, smarter and better, and our industry is benefiting from improvements in quality, cost and schedule. As clients and communities start experiencing the benefits — in terms of savings, collaboration, efficiencies, better environmental, social and governance outcomes, and more effective operation and maintenance — we’ll continue to bring to market new digital and innovation offerings that will reshape the infrastructure industry.

“The Virtual Meeting Room developed by ArchTam to support Fort Benning’s HOMMTA public notice period provided participants with a platform that delivered the necessary materials and information to effectively conduct our virtual public meeting. This platform enabled Fort Benning to use modern digital capabilities to adapt to the COVID environment.” – U.S Army Corps of Engineers, Savannah District

If we are to build a better world for generations to come, we need all members of our society to be active, vocal participants in the process. Virtual public consultation, incorporating VR, is a powerful tool in achieving societal equity and improving our built environment for our communities.

I would like to thank the people who helped bring the Virtual Consultation tool to life and make it a success. Through their hard work and innovative approach to problem solving, Andy Thomas, Xavier Xia and Jamie Lord were able to bring this offering to market quickly and ensure our clients’ work kept moving forward.

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The coronavirus crisis has shown just how essential innovation is. In response to the pandemic, we moved the majority of our 14,000 staff across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) to remote working — in some cases practically overnight. That was possible because we’d already invested in the technology and infrastructure to allow our teams to work remotely and with agility. However, we never anticipated working from home at this scale. When the pandemic first began, several of our leaders had reservations as to how this would work for a prolonged period of time for so many people. We’ve been able to not only sustain in this new working arrangement for more than three months, but also to thrive.

The coronavirus has forced the pace of change — and we need to keep that up. The lockdowns have prompted us to migrate more projects to secure cloud-based platforms and massively accelerate our BIM360 virtual training program to reach more than 400 people in each session. In doing so, we’ve been able to complete six months of in-person training in just a few weeks!

We’ve also seen how digital tools have enabled the super-rapid completion of projects during this crisis. We delivered the NHS Louisa Jordan coronavirus field hospital in Glasgow, Scotland, with zero defects in just three weeks, thanks to embedding dynamic digital tools to record and monitor defects in real time.

Overall outcomes of ArchTam’s digital transformation

The adoption of digital tools and processes has helped us work faster, smarter and better, and our clients are benefiting from improvements in quality, cost and schedule. We’re continually innovating and developing our own tools and processes such as the Reality Capture tool which visually captures on-site construction progress in minutes, and provides open access to all stakeholders to share information easily and efficiently.

I should also highlight a couple of other brilliant solutions such as the Playbook information management platform we’ve developed for LinkedIn and others, and the virtual public consultation tool developed by VR Lead Andy Thomas that is now being used by a number of councils in the UK, Public Health England and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. We have talented, insightful people who are bringing digital and innovation to the forefront of how we deliver spot-on solutions for our clients’ challenges.

Next steps

A full transition to making digital “business as usual” is the next step, and to do this we need to focus on skills. We want everyone at ArchTam to be able to design for and in the future. The 2D to 3D upskilling program we’re launching this year for more than1,000 people across EMEA is ambitious, but essential, and I’m excited to see where it will take us.

Upskilling more of our people is key to our success and we are embedding a strong digital and innovation culture through internal competitions such as our Mindblazer and Global Challenge programs. Ian Small, our EMEA Innovation Champion, has been sourcing fantastic solutions through these programs, which encourage innovation and ideas from any employee in any part of the company. Our EMEA Digital Project Delivery team has then been driving this innovation into projects, in partnership with our teams and clients. We’re seeing great outcomes as a result, such as the UK’s first Digital ES for the A303 project for Highways England.

The post-coronavirus recovery

Digital adoption is really a means to transforming outcomes for communities, and our off-site volumetric solution, INNO, that has been developed with Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, is helping to accelerate the delivery of much needed homes. Working virtually in BIM360, producing Design for Manufacture and Assemblydetailing, we’re able to deliver higher quality, low-carbon homes, in half the time. I’m hoping that success will breed further success and increase digital adoption in our industry.

Once clients start experiencing the benefits — the savings, collaboration, efficiencies, better environmental, social and governance (ESG) outcomes, and more effective operation and maintenance — we’ll start to tip the scales toward digital and innovation as commonplace in the construction industry.

We’re also supporting our clients in their digital transformation journeys as well as our own — delivering a more resilient way of working in the post-coronavirus recovery. The recent crisis has accelerated the transition and we need to build on that momentum. We are proud of the market-leading work we are delivering with the development and use of digital libraries and common data environments, both of which were invaluable to keep design and collaboration going in a virtual environment. As we come out of this crisis we can’t go back to business as usual — we want to accelerate the industry’s digital transformation and support communities in their recovery.

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How is ArchTam weathering the coronavirus pandemic?

Steve: It hasn’t been without challenges, but I’m proud of how we’ve come together to support our people, our clients and our communities. The need to collaborate across the globe fueled our digital transformation several years ago, allowing us to quickly pivot to remote working as the pandemic spread, with up to 90 percent of our workforce becoming virtual. The feedback from our clients has been exceptional. We also have an amazing team of disaster response specialists in the U.S. who were able to rapidly mobilize in support of the pandemic response, helping our clients expand hospital capacity by thousands of beds in alternate medical care facilities. We also have a strong digital and innovation team that is helping our clients engage with the public virtually during this time. Like everyone, we still don’t know how the long-term economic impacts will play out, but we’ve kept a great team together, built a strong foundation and are actively engaged in helping companies and states plan a safe return-to-service and a better normal.

What role has innovation played in your pandemic response?

Steve: It’s been critical. From the earliest days of the pandemic, I’ve been receiving messages saying, “what if we do this?”; “have we considered this approach?” and so on. I’ve always known we have some of the brightest minds in the industry, but to see what’s possible when we are all united by a common purpose — in this case, a crisis — has been incredible.

Orla: Yes, exactly. And it’s not just new ideas either. We’ve invented brand-new apps and service offerings, of course, but we’ve also repurposed existing digital solutions in new and exciting ways that we didn’t anticipate prior to this crisis. The urgency of the pandemic helped expedite early-stage innovations like our virtual consultation tool and it unlocked the potential of earlier innovations to new use cases like our Mobilitics^TM scenario planning platform. Witnessing a company as large as ArchTam innovate at the speed of a startup has been an incredible experience.

Can you give an example of an ArchTam innovation driven by the pandemic?

Orla: I come from a transportation background so I may be biased, but one of my favorites is the reimagining of our Mobilitics^TM platform. A few years ago, a team of traffic planners and engineers won ArchTam’s Global Challenge innovation contest with an idea to use census data to model travel demand scenarios and inform the decision-making process of transportation agencies around questions such as:

• How will electric vehicles change traffic patterns?
• Will autonomous vehicles change our needs for parking space?

With seed money from the challenge, Mobilitics^TM was born. When the coronavirus crisis began, the team quickly realized the potential of combining the tool with big data to help address issues such as which people can come back to work and from what neighborhoods, and which areas will have the most traffic given stages of reopening. We partnered with big data providers to introduce geospatial dimensions to the data set and rewrote the algorithms. The result is a platform that can help transit agencies determine which trains or buses to put into service, at what capacity, frequency and timetable based on parameters shaped by the coronavirus pandemic. It takes the trial-and-error out of a return to service.

Steve: There are so many examples, but one of my favorites that I’m following closely is the ability to detect coronavirus in wastewater. Our water specialists are involved in wastewater testing and plant design for almost all of the major treatment plants in the United States. Through a combination of client relationships, deep experience in the science of wastewater and global studies that have proven the ability to detect the virus in wastewater, our team has developed a strategy to implement nationwide COVID-19 wastewater sampling, testing and analysis. The implications for this innovation are tremendous as states begin to test reopening of businesses. The more data available about this virus that we can get into the hands of scientists and public health officials — the better their ability to make decisions.

Much has been written about the difficulty of harnessing innovation. How did you do it?

Steve: We hired Orla. Well, only partially kidding. We’ve recognized for some time now that the keys to competitiveness are collaboration and innovation. It’s what our clients want and should expect from us. As important, innovation is also the key to retaining great people. No one wants to work in a design factory. The best and brightest want to work for a company that challenges them and rewards out-of-the-box thinking. It is no coincidence for me, that the more we focus on innovation and technical excellence, the more our team members want to stay at ArchTam.

Orla: It takes a holistic approach and support from leadership — and we have that in Steve and all of our senior leaders. It’s also critical that innovation not be relegated to a one-off initiative; it must become part of the fabric of employee experience, which is why the first pillar of innovation we deployed was around people. We’ve tried to do that in a number of ways. The Global Challenge I mentioned earlier is an innovation competition, looking for the next big idea. Each year, winners receive a share of a $1 million prize to further develop their idea. The consistency of this challenge and the “no-kidding-this-has-gone-to-market” part about it has made it incredibly powerful. We also realize that sometimes, an innovation might not be the next big global idea, but it can still have major impact on a local level. To harvest and reward these smaller ideas with a big impact, we’ve launched Mindblazer innovation challenges, which are quicker challenges that reward winners with time to move their ideas forward.

In addition, we’ve set up a group of nearly 200 early career “Innovation Agents” to help drive the culture throughout the organization and an Innovation Council to help steer what can be a big ship with the soul of a speedboat. Telling the story of innovation is also critical. Every year, we celebrate our top 10 innovative projects. We produce Innominutes — 60-second videos about recent innovations — and Innovation Showcases, which are deeper dives with Q&A. Keeping it all together is strong leadership commitment. I believe this foundation has been a critical component to our coronavirus response.

That’s a lot. What’s next?

Steve: I know I don’t just speak for myself when I say we are hoping for a quick end to the pandemic. Realistically though, we know there is a long way to go — in helping clients safely return to operations and developing a measured, phased return to service. We also know that what we are returning to will be different than what we left. But some things will remain the same. I have been particularly impressed with how our clients have continued to focus on key issues like sustainability and social equity throughout the pandemic. How do we take the best of what we’ve seen, engineer resilient solutions to the vulnerabilities that have been exposed and design, build, engineer and plan for a better normal? How do we ensure that we get the best possible returns on much-needed stimulus funding? Those are the questions we are helping clients with today.

Orla: The path ahead isn’t easy, but I’m energized by the promise of a better normal. The coronavirus has forced the world’s biggest pilot of digital work/life. It has created the greatest experiment in CO₂ reduction the world has ever seen, and it has forced widespread behavior changes in record time. The question I’m asking is, how can we design infrastructure that continues these positive gains so that we aren’t just creating a new normal but a better normal?  A better normal must also be a resilient one; our industry has so much to offer in designing systems and structures that can withstand the shocks and stressors of pandemics, weather events and all types of future uncertainties.

We’re crowdsourcing ideas on a better normal from our employees and are convening clients, policy makers and thought leaders in a virtual hackathon to “hack a better normal” with multiple perspectives and creative problem solving. Solving problems is our profession and our passion, and this crisis will undoubtedly be the mother of many more innovations to come.

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As we look to the future of our work, we are comforted to see that our vision for the firm’s digital transformation holds true. We will remain a talented, efficient and focused team — benefitting from our scale and the strength of our digital tools to deliver the best results in the industry. For example, virtual collaboration tools are table stakes in our industry and we have transitioned seamlessly to a remote work environment during the coronavirus pandemic.

Looking to the future of how we deliver work, some of our most important investments are in creating artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms to enable our teams to become even more capable and efficient. In today’s world, a secondary benefit is fast becoming apparent: Applying ArchTam’s digital tools allows more of our work to be delivered remotely, by a connected global workforce, than ever before — especially critical when our clients or the global environment demand it.

In our design business, we have developed a platform called ArchTam Learned Intelligence, or ALI. ALI is an artificial intelligence engine that is constantly learning from our engineering work. Whether it be a campus, a structure or a transportation network, ALI is capable of processing all the three-dimensional elements of each design. Over time, ALI is building an ever-growing library against which to check every future design that ArchTam creates. In close to real-time, ALI advises our designers in order to improve the quality of their modeling.

Tools like ALI present several benefits for our business. First, they improve the quality of our work by taking full advantage of our scale. It’s as if every ArchTam engineer is looking over the shoulder of our teams as they create a new design, ready to provide input and potentially catch errors and omissions before they happen. Second, they allow our organization to effectively collaborate remotely. ALI doesn’t depend on being co-located in the same ArchTam office. Tools like ALI allow our employees to work naturally at scale, involving the most capable people from our global footprint in our projects. Finally, they provide immense value to our clients. Imagine a world where any infrastructure owner could tap into our collective experience to review a design.

Another exciting innovation from ArchTam involves our field work. We believe that computer vision and artificial intelligence will revolutionize the way in which we collect data outside of our offices. We have created a platform that uses video and imagery collected in the field and applies artificial intelligence to find and assess infrastructure assets. Eventually, any decision that our engineer could make in the field — the condition of an overhead electric grid, the quality of a building facade, the suitability of roadway for autonomous vehicles — will be made by artificial intelligence. By training models using our skilled engineering workforce and fully leveraging our industry-leading scale, we will provide our clients even more efficient and effective infrastructure services. Today, putting less people in the field and collecting data in more efficient ways means less impact on our clients and the communities they serve.

Has our digital future changed? We don’t think so, but our journey is accelerating. At ArchTam, we continue to lead the industry in imagining what’s next. Visit our new Innovation + Digital microsite, where we share innovative solutions, products, thought leadership and success stories from across our global business.

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We are excited to announce the launch of ArchTam’s new Innovation + Digital microsite, a platform to interact with you — our clients and partners — to share innovative solutions, products, thought leadership and success stories from across our global business.

Innovation and digital transformation are essential to our culture at ArchTam. Across the globe, our talented teams are always working to improve infrastructure and create opportunities for everyone. Whether we are creating digital solutions to drive efficient design, innovating through modular construction, or helping the world address environmental contaminants like PFAS, we are at the forefront of change.

Our people are finding new and improved methods of working — with project collaboration moving to the cloud, remote teams are becoming the norm and our scale is emerging as a key differentiator for our company.

As we continue our digital journey, we are focused on three key areas of growth:

• Efficient and Automated Design and Construction captures how we apply technology to design better, build faster and collaborate virtually throughout the process.
• Data-driven Asset Management focuses on the infrastructure lifecycle, bringing digital tools and process innovations to how we assess, plan, deliver, operate and maintain the world in which we live.
• Data Management and Intelligence looks to unlock the value of data, capturing the scale of ArchTam’s global footprint and delivering valuable offerings for our clients across sectors.

We encourage you to fully explore our Innovation + Digital site. For a complete experience:

• Start by watching the video highlighting our global achievements at ArchTam.
• Read about how ArchTam and Google sponsored an exciting hackathon with our clients.
• Listen to Pete Flint discuss the future of offsite modular construction, hosted by James Banks on ArchTam’s Talking Infrastructure podcast. Then dive deeper, with insights from designer and author of “A Lead Designer’s Handbook” Dale Sinclair as he describes transforming the design process.
• Download our Digital Delivery Report for future reference and spend some time getting to know our global Digital and Innovation network, who are helping to deliver cutting edge solutions to projects across the world.

We encourage you to visit our new microsite to learn more about our digital journey, our offerings, how to reach us for more information and, ultimately, how we can best partner with you to deliver an innovative future.

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