Plaana plans projects with Tekla Solution for infrastructure designers
In 2010, the largest road improvement projects in Finland include the renewal of Ring I and the Turku highway in Leppävaara, Espoo, and the “Kallansillat” road project on highway 5. Plaana Oy is a Finnish community planning office responsible for the planning of, for example, the road and environmental structures of these construction contracts.
The consulting company Plaana Oy, established in 2001, and its engineering office subsidiary Insinööritoimisto Ponvia Oy employ approximately 40 people. The group’s line of business is road planning, transport planning, municipal engineering, project management as well as planning and development of bridges and water and port facilities. The customers of the group consist of contractors, municipalities and government agencies.
Plaana uses Tekla Solution for infrastructure designers. At the core of the solution is Tekla Civil, which is a model-based information system for, for example, the planning of roads, streets and railroads as well as water and sewer networks.
“We chose the solution based on our previous positive operating experience,” says Project Manager Pekka Mosorin from Plaana. Tekla Solution has been the planning system used in Plaana since the company was established.
Ring I is being upgraded as part of a larger Leppävaara planning and implementation project (STU2). A total of 26 bridges and approximately 8 kilometers of ramps are being built. Chief planner Kari Rautio from Plaana says that Tekla's solution is the starting point for all planning. All construction contract plans, such as road and environmental plans, as well as plans for traffic management during construction are carried out in the solution.
Accurate tender calculation
The costs of the Ring I Leppävaara contract total approximately EUR 35 million, of which planning costs are about EUR 1 million. Ensuring the flow of the busy traffic on Ring I during construction work is a challenging part of the Leppävaara contract planning. 70,000 vehicles pass through Leppävaara on Ring I every day.
“Creating plans for traffic management during construction is an exceptionally large part of the contract and a major cost item in the construction,” says Mosorin.
The calculation of tender prices for road projects requires correct and up-to-date basic data.
“Tekla's solution allows flexible and accurate calculation of mass quantities for a construction contract, thus enabling easy comparison of the costs between different alternatives,” says Mosorin.
“In the Leppävaara project, it was important to obtain sufficiently accurate data about the quantities of cut and fill at the tender stage: correct determination of quantities was important. It was also important that the structures could be adapted to the terrain model as accurately and easily as possible to ensure reliable data with reasonable costs,” says Mosorin.
“It is demanding to create cross sections and adapt them to the terrain model,” Rautio points out.
“We determined the required quantities and created cross-section plans in Tekla Civil and are satisfied with the solution. It suits our large projects well. Our determinations of quantities have been reliable, and practice has shown that with Tekla Civil we can obtain data faster and with less amount of work than we can from other systems,” says Mosorin.
Cost savings with an efficient system
Fast and efficient information management brings cost savings to contract planning.
“In my opinion, we have been able to reduce the total cost of our tenders as the planning price is composed of used time,” says Mosorin.
Continuous planning
Road projects are often implemented using the continuous planning model. The road geometry, defined in the contract’s call for tender, is seldom changed during the planning but the more detailed structural design is carried out during the construction phase.
With continuous road planning, everything is in constant change after the beginning, as Mosorin puts it. Tekla's solution, which is based on a database, does not limit changes, and changes are automatically updated in all project plans.
Dialog over solution development
Plaana Oy has also been involved in the development projects of Tekla's solution, providing a user’s perspective to the focused solution development carried out in Tekla in cooperation with the customers.
“Ongoing dialog between the customer and software provider is a good thing,” says Mosorin.
“I also think it is very important that there are no major interruptions in the solution operation due to version updates and that we do not have to transfer old data back into the system after the update.”
Photo of Leppävaaransolmu: Liikennevirasto
Photos of Mosorin and Rautio: Plaana Oy