Overview
Kier is working for National Highways on the A417 Missing Link Project in Gloucestershire, dualling the final section of the single carriageway to link the A417 with the M5 motorway.
The A417/A419 provides an important route between Gloucester and Swindon that helps connect the Midlands/North to the South of England. It’s an alternative to the M5/M4 route via Bristol. The Missing Link itself is a three-mile stretch of single-lane carriageway on the A417 between the Brockworth bypass and Cowley roundabout in Gloucestershire.
- 3.4 miles of new dual carriageway connecting the existing A417 Brockworth bypass with the existing A417 dual carriageway south of Cowley.
- The section to the west of the existing Air Balloon roundabout would follow the existing A417 corridor. The section to the south and east of the Air Balloon roundabout would be offline, away from the existing road. corridor.
- A new junction at Shab Hill, providing a link from the A417 to the A436 towards Oxford and into Birdlip.
- A new junction would be included near Cowley will replace the existing Cowley roundabout.
- The existing A417 between the Air Balloon roundabout and the Cowley roundabout is to be repurposed into a route for walkers, cyclists and horse riders, while retaining other sections to maintain local access for residents.
Transportal CDE
The client mandates the use of their own ProjectWise CDE by participants for all design and project defined documentation and is used to issue documentation to the client. This has major implications for the kier team:
- There is no Kier owned and controlled record of documentation that is held in the client’s ProjectWise system. There are limited records available for Kier that provide the audit trail of works done and issues to client.
- The additional users of a typical project, that are involved with internal Kier documentation, don’t have access to the client’s CDE and therefore have a separate document store themselves, often resorting to SharePoint folders.
- Internal Kier, and 3rd party sub-contractor, referencing of the documentation split between the client’s system and Kier SharePoint then carries a large management overhead, leading to increased costs and potential errors of incorrect information access.
All of these provide a challenge to the project team to collaborate efficiently and minimise inefficiencies and errors.
Transportal have provided an additional CDE to the project to enable these challenges to be met:
- The Kier owned Transportal CDE is used to capture a copy of the ProjectWise documentation on every issue to the client providing a Kier internal reference for all project participants outside of the client’s system.
- This CDE now provide a single secure location for all additional documentation on the project and minimises the use of SharePoint folders for project records.
- 3rd parties can now be referred to the Transportal CDE for information, simplifying user access to the latest information and guaranteeing that all these records will be available for as long as Kier require.
Quality Forms
In addition, Transportal Forms are also being utilised by the Quality Team. Hosted in the same CDE, the digital forms are being used for Site Diaries, Non-Conformance Reports (NCR’s) and Inspection and Test Plans (ITP’s). These forms were largely inherited from a previous job, ‘Windy Harbour’ – where they are currently being handed over to the same client.
The quality team are trained in the publishing of their own forms and are thus introducing new forms as they are needed.
Use of these forms is enabling data capture directly on-site locations, and recording everything directly in the database, enhancing the CDE value to the project as an information store. The forms are then also available on the desktop for a wider team review and completion with all documentation attached to the form to make a self-encapsulated complete record of works.
Fortnightly status registers are exported to the client keeping everyone up to date, and once complete the packages are easily transferrable to the client’s system for handover. Having already captured the data at works stage, handover preparation is massively reduced with potential large savings in time and resource.