Dowco Consultants Ltd is one of the leading service companies in North America that specializes in 3D Modeling, Steel Detailing, and other pre-construction services. Working out of offices in, Vancouver, Toronto and Manila, Dowco Consultants uses highly developed processes and global infrastructure, supported by experienced staff to meet project requirements and exceed client expectations. Dowco likes to say “Some say it can’t be done – but we think different!” The company’s projects include landmarks such as Safeco Field in Seattle, the Disney Concert Hall and the Denver Art Museum.
Dowco uses a “follow-the-sun” model to stay competitive, but even after investing in high-speed connections and a file-transfer system to keep work flowing between offices around the clock, the company’s technology couldn’t keep up. Slow file transfers between the company’s 3 international offices hurt productivity for distributed project teams, who need to regularly access the same CAD and BIM files. CAD technicians would come in as early as 6:00 AM to catch up on project work, only to find the model wasn’t available because the Dowco offshore offices in Manila were still working on the model. According to Ron Cuthbert, General Manager at Dowco, “We wouldn’t get the model back until 10:00 AM, and we’d have highly paid technicians not necessarily twiddling their thumbs, but not moving forward with their projects. It could take hours to send the file between Vancouver, Toronto and Manila or India, and as we got more projects, the delay became longer and longer.”
From there, the problem only got worse. Dowco’s IT staff wrote scripts to automate many tasks, but it was still a slow and manual process. “We had to assign a staff member at each location to oversee the file transfer process,” explained Phillip Young, IT Manager at Dowco. “People ended up working overtime. It had a cascading effect, which meant the model didn’t get back to the other office in time.”
Dowco’s Executive Vice President (EVP) Brian Pyper heard from a customer that was working with another steel detailing firm about a company called Panzura that could provide a cloud solution that would eliminate latency and provide for much faster collaboration between offices. Pyper realized the potential right away of Panzura’s approach to model and resource sharing. After Brian connected with Panzura, Dowco implemented Panzura’s hybrid cloud technology and patented global file-locking system, deploying a Panzura controlled in each of its offices. The company phased out existing file servers in each office and consolidated backup to the cloud, using the Google Cloud to host its files.
Dowco saw a number of improvements, but most importantly the company was able to stay competitive in a tough market by reducing IT expenditure, job costs and improving productivity. Contracts in the steel detailing industry are at a fixed price so profits are determined by how efficiently projects can be completed.
Project teams at Dowco sites could now collaborate on CAD and BIM (building information modeling) files in real-time, rather than waiting for files to copy and then working individually. This boosted productivity and reduced time to job completion. Where users previously had to wait hours for models from other offices to transfer, multiple users in different offices could now work on the same project files simultaneously. As a result, the company was also able to double the capacity of the Manila office by adding a second shift.
Additionally, the company experienced almost immediate cost-savings. With Panzura in place, Dowco’s monthly bill for all tiers of storage, including backup, archiving and disaster recovery, dropped to just over $300 a month with the Google Cloud. The IT staff was also able to stop doing nightly backups to tape at each site, increasing backup retention from 2 weeks to 1 year and dramatically improving reliability of the backups. As Dowco general manager Ron Cuthbert put it, the “IT staff went from managing four offices to feeling like they were only managing one office.”
Doubled productivity in Manila office. Because Dowco teams could now collaborate in real-time rather than waiting for files to transfer, they were able to add a second shift in Manila.
Reduced project costs by increasing billable time per team member. With Panzura, project teams could collaborate much more effectively, adding hours per month to billable time for each person.
Direct savings of $200,000/year. The IT team conducted an internal ROI analysis and concluded that conservatively, between the direct IT savings and improved productivity, they were saving $200,000 a year with Panzura.
Improved backup data retention from 2 weeks to 1 year, with shorter backup intervals. Panzura uses the cloud as a backup target, so rather than rely on nightly local backups at each office that had limited capacity, Dowco is now able to keep a year of backups and make backups much more frequently.
The Panzura Global File System (GFS) connects users in different offices around the world and lets them collaborate like they’re in the same room on the same files and applications at the same time. It eliminates the “file open” problem for CAD or similar applications and is as fast as a local file server in every office, but users are all accessing the same files. The Panzura GFS is backed by a central cloud repository and can span dozens of sites.
Panzura’s solution is changing the way AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) companies like Dowco work by making real-time cross-site collaboration possible. Panzura’s file locking technology enables BIM and CAD file sharing and eliminates the need for multiple versions of files. The product significantly decreases latency between sites and makes files much quicker and easier to open since files are cached at each site and synchronized between them through the cloud.
Panzura also collapses all tiers of storage into a single tier in the cloud, significantly reducing data center sprawl. Panzura lets customers use the cloud of their choice as primary storage, eliminating the need for local file storage, backup, offsite tape archives, replication and disaster recovery infrastructure. Panzura also deduplicates and compresses all the data in its Global File System, reducing the storage footprint for customers by more than 10x in many cases. Because Panzura uses the cloud, customers can pay as they go for primary storage, rather than buying expensive servers and arrays years ahead of when they need them.
Shortly after Dowco installed Panzura, there was some resistance from the front-line Dowco employees who weren’t used to using the new form of storage. However, employees quickly saw how much time they could save collaborating on files with the new infrastructure. The ability to work on the same file at the same time across sites was, as one engineer put it, “mind-blowing.” Today the company is operating as one multinational organization across the world.