Building Iceland's New National Hospital with Procore

The Challenge

Opening in the mid to late decade, the new National University Hospital of Iceland will provide more efficient and effective care to the next generation of Icelanders and their families. The construction of the main hospital building will be divided into five building sections. It will measure about 70,000 square meters (753,000 sq ft) and be one of Iceland’s largest buildings. To manage such a complex project, Nýr landspítali ohf (NLSH, English: New National Hospital Plc.) was formed with a special act from Parliament in 2010 with the purpose of overseeing the complete project and acting as a hub between the design teams, contractors, consulting personnel at the hospital and the government.

NLSH needed a construction platform capable of connecting thousands of project stakeholders and over 7,000 architectural drawings––providing complete visibility from design review through the course of construction.

The Solution

With Procore’s easy-to-use and intuitive platform, NLSH can achieve a seamless process for drawing management, ensuring that project teams can quickly and easily view and markup drawings and revisions from start to finish. 

Procore enables NLSH to bring information and teams together on a single connected platform, with information updated in real-time so nothing is missed. Procore’s information logs also provide the full history of the project.

As the project moves from pre construction through the course of construction, Procore’s mobile collaboration tools make it easy for everyone to have a clear understanding of what needs to be done every day to stay on schedule and prevent rework.

The Story

As the single largest and most expensive project in the history of Iceland, providing a seamless process for information management and design review is critical to the success of the new hospital project. Procore provides a centralised repository for over 7,000 architectural drawings with an unlimited number of project collaborators working across the platform from start to finish.

Einar H. Reynis, IT and Technical Officer for NLSH explains: "It was obvious from day one that we would need a solution. The sheer volume of information on a project this size means that it is essential that the entire team is always viewing the latest, most up to date drawings and programme information. Not everyone on our team is familiar with Gantt charts, so we like that the programme tool offers a view by day, week or month. With Procore, drawings are automatically named, numbered and recorded too using OCR, which saves a lot of time with manual filing." 

Procore’s platform connects all of NLSH’s project information in one place that is easily accessible to project collaborators. "I researched other solutions, but quickly saw that Procore was ahead of the competition," Reynis says. "Procore offered a single destination which would help us organise information, drive visibility of performance and ultimately deliver the project on time and budget."

Because Procore offers unlimited storage space, and no limit on the number of sheets or data on a project, NLSH can easily manage the large number of collaborators on the project and the significant number of drawings that need to be reviewed.

Easy Collaboration with Design Teams

For a project of this scale, timely and efficient collaboration with design teams is essential, and a key aspect of this is collaboration on Requests for Information, or RFIs. RFIs can help a project run smoothly and on schedule, but they can also cause significant delays and overruns. Timely RFI management is the key to good schedule management, and ultimately, project success.

With Procore, the NLSH team is easily able to collaborate with design teams on RFIs. "Architects and engineers don’t have to log into Procore to complete an RFI," says Reynis. "All of the processes around an RFI can be completed via email. With Procore’s RFI email functionality, and in particular the Outlook integration, there’s no learning curve, and no formal training is needed." 

Procore also adds value to NLSH’s design review process by keeping track of the various communications that are involved in closing each RFI. Procore tracks the email trail of back and forth conversations for each RFI, which enables the history to be recalled and reviewed at any time in the future. This could be during the project or long after the course of construction has been completed. 

With Procore’s "Related To" feature, teams can also attach any document to an RFI, so that the supporting information—plans, specs, photos, PDFs—is linked to the RFI.

Robust Correspondence Management

"With a project like this, one of the major challenges is keeping track of all of the information that goes around a project," says Reynis. "It was important that we were able to standardise and manage project correspondence and communications in one place."

Using Procore’s Correspondence Tool, NLSH has been able to consolidate and connect the entire scope of business processes on a project through the design phases into the course of construction. Everything is easily accessible in one place so you can minimise risk and mitigate project disputes.

The Correspondence Tool has also highlighted the benefits of NLSH working from a single, connected platform. A correspondence can be turned into an RFI or a variation at the click of a button, and each item links to the other for complete record keeping. A correspondence can also be linked to drawings stored in Procore, and is fully searchable, enabling NLSH to surface new insights that were previously impossible or time-consuming to gather.

With Procore, administrators like Reynis can also easily set permission templates to ensure the right level of visibility for each type of communication, or area of the project. The permissions tab also enables administrators to quickly check who can see each communication, removing guesswork.

For Reynis, the benefits of a platform approach are clear: "With Procore, we have a single, easy-to-use destination for our project. Procore ensures that the project is running consistently, and to schedule, which is essential on a complex project such as a new hospital. Procore’s always-on support has also proved invaluable in ensuring that everyone can make full use of the platform."