Terminal 3 at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport is the world’s eighth-largest passenger terminal. After its completion in mid-2010, the $2 billion development occupies 5.4 million sq. ft and can accommodate 34 million passengers annually. The terminal, approximately three kms in length, features 160 check-in counters, 78 aerobridges and 85 aircraft stands.

In addition to Terminal 3, the expansion project at the airport included a new runway. At a length of 4.4 kms, it is Asia’s second-longest runway and can accommodate the world’s largest aircraft, including the Airbus A380.

The construction timetable was highly ambitious as it chalked out the completion of the project in only 39 months. Given the efficiency of the project team, this project was completed two months earlier than planned. Juxtaposed with the timelines of other, newer airport terminals, this was a commendable task. For example, completion of the latest terminal at The Changi Airport in Singapore took 76 months and delivery of London Heathrow Airport’s T5 and Beijing’s Terminal 3 took 60 months each.



Delhi Chooses L&T
L&T was the engineering, procurement and construction consultant on the project. It delivered the project in association with the Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) as a joint venture consortium that comprised the GMR Group, Airports Authority of India, Fraport & Eraman Malaysia and IDF. Along with project managers Parsons Brinckerhoff, L&T was responsible for bringing the project to completion on behalf of DIAL.

Information Overload Woes
With the project’s aggressive schedules in place, ensuring the right people see the right information, at the right time was crucial for keeping the project on track.

This challenge was made greater by the size and complexity of the project team. In addition to the JV parties, thousands of participants from more than 70 organisations were engaged for the project—45 of these firms were based offshore (in locations as far as London, Dubai, Singapore and Sydney).

For the first few months of the project, the team used a combination of FTP systems, hard copies and email to communicate. However, with thousands of documents and correspondence items being exchanged, the team was experiencing bottlenecks and difficulties in meeting their turnaround targets. Factors such as file-size restrictions on email accounts meant that drawings sent to external stakeholders bounced back, slowing down the review cycle. L&T identified that these issues would only escalate as the project ramped up.

Aconex for Turbulence-Free Control
Following an extensive review of available solutions, L&T implemented the Aconex online collaboration system to control information and link the project team. Aconex is a web-based platform that enables all internal and external project participants to view, distribute and track their documents and correspondence in real time, through one central system.

Since Aconex is web-based, all authorised project participants can log on to the system and have full access to the information their organisation has created and sent. Aconex is entirely responsible for delivering product enhancements and meeting the required security, reliability and performance standards, which means that minimal IT resources were required for implementation and maintenance.

After implementing Aconex’s solution, companies on the airport project used the system to manage more than 300,000 documents and one million mail items—sometimes upto 1,00,000 items in a single month.

L&T Heaves a Sigh of Relief
For all project members, Aconex provided a secure, central repository for documents and correspondence, ensuring that information was easily available and were not forgotten in a personal computer or mailbox. Regardless of where project participants were located, they could log on to the system and instantly access the files or mails they required.

For faster retrieval of items such as drawings, RFIs and other files and emails, the software provided advanced searching capabilities. Users could perform search-engine style keyword searches and/or filter using pre-defined attributes, date ranges, email and document types, sender details and other criteria.

Adept Time Management
Shankar Narayannan – Head of Project Controls at Larsen & Toubro for the DIAL Project, supervised the overall project planning, control and coordination with the developer, and oversaw the implementation of Aconex.

He found Aconex to be an indispensible element of the project. Every document and email distribution was searchable and accessible from remote locations. He also said that this helped him greatly when he travelled to-and-fro from cities, as he could easily pick up documents whenever he needed them.

The team also found that a lot of time was saved in searching for information. The keyword search capabilities were powerful, so people could instantly look up what they needed. The time that was saved in locating documents was very important on this project and this task was something they could quickly accomplish with Aconex.

Faster Information Flow
After a document was stored on Aconex, it could be instantly transmitted to other project members for review or approval. Delivery of information was immediate and certain, and the system maintained an audit trail detailing ‘who did what and when?’ Any change to a document was clearly recorded with outstanding and overdue actions (such as RFIs that were not responded to) are highlighted to identify bottlenecks and promote accountability.



Mr Shankar highlighted that due to the set timeline, the team had a very strict review cycle, and hence, the distribution of documents between parties had to be very quick. The team comprised a number of stakeholders, with often about 1,200 engineers engaged on the project; thus, distributing the right files to all these people was a complex task. Before the implementation of Aconex, reviewing and corresponding via email would lead to messagge bounching back and there would be no proper record of what was sent or received. But when information was sent on the new system, they could easily monitor its reach and receipt.

Mr Shankar also noted that since he received between 400–500 email and document actions in a day, it was extremely difficult for him to keep up with them. With the help of Aconex, he received notification of new items and could browse through his tasks and actions in one place. The fact that contractual correspondence was well-documented and could be traced was of great value to the team.

The Finishing Touches
Initially, because other tools had been used in the early stages of the project, Aconex and L&T worked together to ensure that all existing documentation was uploaded to the Aconex system. From then onwards, Aconex was the default tool for managing all documents and mails.

As loading all of L&T’s documents onto the system was a considerable task, there were challenges faced during the initial implementation stage. The fact that Aconex was a new, project-wide system meant that they had to get team members to use, instead of FTP and email. However, the training provided by Aconex was excellent and project members quickly got into the routine of using it, observed Mr Shankar.

To ensure that project members were adept at using the system, Aconex ran customised training modules for all participants and supplemented these modules with unlimited helpdesk and online support. An Aconex Account Manager was appointed to manage and coordinate the implementation, support and advanced training, wherever required.

L&T project personnel commended Aconex for providing excellent customer service and training facilities. Being able to provide local training to the entire global project team was a very strong advantage and a key reason why the contractors selected Aconex. New participants were quickly made comfortable with using the system as there was a helpline available 24/7.

Courtesy: Aconex