On 29 May 2008 in Baltimore (close to Washington DC in the USA) the Gautrain Project received a prestigious international award at the Best Practices for Sustaining Infrastructure Conference.  This award is for Excellence in Project Management, and specifically for “Innovation in Rail and Transit”.  The Gautrain Project also won a Finalist Position in the “Connecting Project Teams” category.

Gautrain competed with over 250 top global infrastructure projects for this award which was judged by an independent panel of experts.  The award is sponsored by, amongst others, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard International. Bentley is a global supplier of architectural, engineering, project management, construction and infrastructure maintenance software.

One of their products is ProjectWise, a document and project management software programme that was customised by the Gautrain Project Management and Administration Team. It is used by many other globally recognisable flagship projects such as the London Underground rail system and the Amtrak railways in the USA. 

 Gautrain competed with major companies and projects such as the General Motors Corporation, Indiana Department of Transport, a new High Speed Railway Line in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria and the High-Speed Train Arrival in Barcelona, Spain.

Gautrain’s ProjectWise document control software programme was modified to suit its unique Private-Public-Partnership (PPP) project management needs. As a Gauteng Provincial Government initiative, Gautrain is recognised as the biggest PPP project in Africa. Gautrain’s private partners are structured under the Bombela Concession Company and the construction of Gautrain is managed according to a Concession Agreement.

The software was customised to enable all the private and public partners to work collaboratively in an integrated system. It was also specified in the PPP Concession Agreement that all documents in the ProjectWise system would constitute legal documents with a proper auditable tracking system which would enable the monitoring of the parties’ adherence to the contractual agreement. ProjectWise has been used since 2003 when Gautrain was still in a tender and procurement process.

The Gautrain Province team controls more than 750 000 documents to date, ranging from CAD and geospatial images, photographs, correspondence and reports. It is used by a variety of disciplines such as engineers, architects, land-use planners and environmentalists working on Gautrain. The highly secure system has been customised to facilitate a real time audit trail of documents with a collaborative workflow process and ISO quality management systems.  During the tender process, the security of the tender documents in this system was never compromised.  The Gautrain Project Team is currently rolling out a system that will link the as-built drawings, designs and documentation to a geospatial system that will allow users to find documents by clicking on the location and specific structures on a map.

The Gautrain PPP team using ProjectWise comprises both local and international partners. The Bombela Concession Company partners include Canadian company Bombardier, French companies Bouygues Travaux Publics and RATP Développement, South African company Murray & Roberts Limited and a broad-based consortium of black companies called Strategic Partners Group. The Provincial Government team, Gautrain Management Agency and its Support Team, Concessionaire and the Independent Certifier, and their consultants and contractors can access documents through this system, using the Internet as well.

More information on the BE Awards is available on:
http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Community/BE+Awards/2008awards.htm

Another project nominated for the BE Awards:  The Dubai Lagoons (sometimes also referred to as “Candles in the Wind”).