CASE STUDY

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How the UAE Construction GiantKhansaheb Uses OpenSpace for
Seamless Site Documentation

After a diligent review process Khansahebadds OpenSpace 360° reality capture to its
portfolio of cloud solutions

Goal: Seamless Site Documentation for an Ultra Large Scale Condition Survey
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. Duringthat time, the business moved 100% to the cloud with Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) as its core
construction software.
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 withOpenSpace on a newly awarded hospitality contract”, Matt says and they were immediately impressed. WhenKhansaheb 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 stateof the facilities preconstruction—a huge task as the area includes 28 buildings. This is where OpenSpace
became truly invaluable to the team.

1

Strategy: Strategic 360° Site Capture and Use of Field Notes
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 theamount 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 tocategorize 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 andmore seamless creation of dilapidation schedules on three more projects since. “The fact that we can get a360° view of everything is very, very helpful”, he says.

Results: Significant Time Savings, Reduced Risk, and More Transparency
Matt says that while they currently use OpenSpace primarily for the dilapidation survey, he and his team canalready 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.”2

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 largescale project split across 20 buildings. “Using OpenSpace we see quite quickly and more efficiently where weare in terms of progress on site”, Hamish says. On another project he is starting to leverage OpenSpace as acommercial 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.

From preconstruction to automated progress
tracking and facility management, there are clear
benefits of rolling out OpenSpace further within theKhansaheb business in the future.”—Matt CursonGroup IT Manager, Khansaheb

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 fieldnotes 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 theclient. 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 tonavigate. The integration with Autodesk Construction Cloud further ensures that the data is held in one placeand can be shared with relevant systems and uploaded to the Common Data Environment (CDE).

3Risk mitigation
Capturing the entire site with the old, manual process would have taken the team a significant amount oftime 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.

The condition survey completion
would have been difficult, notfully detailed and locationallychallenging to track. The risk
and liability of Khansaheb being
responsible for pre-existing
defects would have been muchhigher without OpenSpace.”—Matt CursonGroup IT Manager, Khansaheb

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