The extensive Streets of Kallvik contract encompasses building 18 streets and walkways as well as municipal engineering services in the district of Kurttila in the City of Espoo, Finland. The agreement between the City of Espoo and Kreate Oy includes rebuilding streets in an area that is currently sparsely populated as well as building new access roads to building plots. The project is expected to be completed in May 2021.

“Infrakit acts as a centralized storage space for all project-related customer documents, reports and drawings. “

Using Infrakit in the project

According to Janne Neste, foreman of the Streets of Kallvik contract, and Jenna Karppanen, a site engineer, Infrakit was introduced in the project at Kreate Oy’s request in order facilitate the quality assurance of the project. Infrakit acts as a centralized storage space for all project-related documents[JJ3] , reports and drawings. This enables the customer to easily access the necessary information and, for example, to view the as-built drawings. Infrakit also enables imaging, verifying and controlling the designs that are transmitted to the working machinery. Another advantage of Infrakit is that all material is in electronic form, making it easier and more efficient to manage.

The Benefits of Infrakit

According to Karppanen and Neste, one the benefits of Infrakit is the ease of communication between the different parties: “Using Infrakit, exporting data to working machinery is easy and the various parties in the project are constantly up to date about all the work that is taking place. When the machine operators import as-built log points into the system, the site office can monitor project progress almost in real-time and make sure that all work is done within the limits and that everything is done properly right from the start. Our hope is that as things progress, this will also facilitate handing the material over to the customer.”

According to Karppanen and Neste, Infrakit makes it easier to get an overview of the project, especially in its early stages: “To begin with, the site was just an open field, and it was very difficult to visualize the future road using drawings alone – Infrakit made that a lot easier. Infrakit makes it easy to visualize your relative position on site and using a GNSS receiver rod you can achieve an accuracy of a few centimeters, which also makes it much easier to visualize the future road.” According to Karppanen, Infrakit makes work more efficient and it is very useful, as long as it contains all the necessary information.

A different approach

In the past, surveyors measured all the as-built dimensions and did the as-built drawings. With Infrakit, the surveyors’ workload has been reduced, since the as-built dimensions are measured to a large extent with the excavators. However, when an accuracy of a few centimeters is necessary or when otherwise challenging measurements are made, the job is always given to the surveyors. The surveyor spends less time on site than before, resulting in savings for the project. This change has, in turn, expanded the range of tasks done by the excavator operators. An important aspect of implementing Infrakit is to get the operators involved. An Infrakit briefing has been held for all operators at the Kreate site and the reception has been positive.

Using Infrakit in the future

According to Karppanen and Neste, Infrakit will continue to be used, and they recommend the service to others as well: “Particularly when handover time approaches, Infrakit will greatly lighten the workload for all parties because all the material is in one place and everyone has the same up-to-date information. This is especially true for large projects like this one. Without Infrakit, everyone would be faced with huge piles of paper and other material. The fact that everything is stored in one place and documents can be searched for using different codes makes the work more efficient.”

Published 12.02.2020