The challenge of digitizing the railway construction sector
Still little exploited in the public works/construction sector, and in the rail sector, digital is nevertheless an important issue that is about to upset the habits and working methods of all the actors in the chain (company holding the market, project management and client). Indeed, it makes it possible to collect data, to share it between teams on and off site and to pool it. Result: the optimization of the collaboration on the site, the follow-up of the defects, the control and the report of conformity, the communication site office, ... which thus contributes to guarantee the respect of the deadlines and the follow-up of the quality of the work. 'work.
Finalcad, a specialist in the digitization of the construction industry, has been putting its expertise at the service of the sector for more than 10 years via its collaborative platform. Since 2016, it has also been working with the main railway construction players for whom it has adapted and enriched its platform.
In addition to its ease of use, the main advantage of this platform is to allow teams to collect and share the various information but also to have feedback from work sites in order to be able to build easily accessible and analyzable databases. The objective being the optimization of construction sites over the long term.
The successful digitization of the ETF service road renovation project - Dreux
ETF's mission was to renew the tracks, near Dreux station, to accommodate the new REGIO 2N trains from 2021. The main challenge was beyond ensuring quality, to guarantee the deadline.
The works began on September 7 and ended on November 4 with a one-month phase during which the teams worked in double rotation 2X8 (6 a.m. to 14 p.m. and 14 p.m. to 22 p.m.) on 3,5 km of tracks.
Throughout the duration of the project, all stakeholders had access to the Finalcad digital platform, both ETF-rated (branch manager, team leader, site manager, quality controller, works supervisor and sector manager ) as well as on the project management side (works supervisor and project manager) as well as the client, SNCF Réseau.
Via the Finalcad collaborative platform, they were able to edit and automatically generate site logs - summaries of events, work carried out during the day, detailed with photos, comments, precise information - which enabled them to save less than an hour a day but also to keep this data in a consolidated way. Managed by the works manager, these digital reports could be shared with the various interlocutors of the project on site or off site; which is particularly useful for team rotations (day/night and weekday/weekend teams) and the traceability of information.
“Innovation and digital transformation are major challenges in the railway construction sector. The benefits of this collaboration with Finalcad, a leading player in the market, were better management of co-activity, better monitoring of the quality of the site, time savings for the teams, particularly during rotations, faster monitoring and reporting. more precise.
Today, this collaboration with Finalcad allows us to collect and share data to improve our construction sites, but this is only a first step in the digitalization of our construction sites.
We would then like to deploy this type of tool on the majority of our construction sites in Ile-de-France to achieve operational excellence on our projects. In addition, we want to deploy large-scale digitalization and integrate BIM into our offers, which Finalcad could also support us with.”, rejoices Jeremy Goguet, Branch Manager at ETF.
“Our first collaboration with ETF dates back to 2016 and we are particularly proud to be able to continue to support this company in the digitalization of its sites. We provide its teams on site and in the offices with a digital platform equipped with an intuitive and easy handling, to enable them to deliver the best work within the given deadlines.
Working with ETF has allowed us to strengthen our expertise in railway construction sites, particularly very large linear ones, and to adapt our tools to this sector, which is becoming increasingly aware of the strategic challenges of digital.”, says Franck Le Tendre, CEO of Finalcad.