What is aconex?
Aconex is Oracle’s electronic document management system to serve comprehensive tools for construction businesses looking for project delivery, productivity, efficiency, and management. It is a cloud-based project management system that helps the construction project operations run smoothly. This management system delivers transparency and control to the users to run and ensure everything, right from the concept origin to its close-out and handover.
Businesses with projects involve thousands of business decisions, participants, and hundreds of documents. Aconex’s tools help users interact and participate in the operational construction phases and throughout the project. It offers tools to increase data control and visibility, streamlines time-intensive tasks, helps in collaboration, connects teams, and reduces risks. The users can increase efficiency in the project by helping manage construction, design coordination, project control, field and document management, and cost. The system’s connected processes help the project managers make decisions and prevent risks even before they occur with this Cloud and mobile platform. Aconex is very portable. The features can manage the projects anywhere and anytime, when necessary.
How does Aconex work?
It securely stores iterative versions of data and documents in the system and can be retrieved when required. It automates schedule synchronization and various other administrative processes to keep the project continuing. It helps provide early warnings about the issues to prevent delays in the project. It gives a connected environment to help team members communicate and collaborate. Furthermore, the project managers benefit from learning about the progression daily from multiple job sites quickly.
How can we use Aconex?
Aconex can be used for large construction and engineering projects. If your organization is new to the concept of an Electronic Document Management System like Aconex. In that case, you can also choose to hire a Document Control Specialist for construction, pipeline, mining, nuclear, or biopharmaceutical industries.
Features of Oracle Aconex
Secure Document Management: The key feature of Aconex is that it saves up to 50% on document processing times. It can manage all documents and has no limitation on the file type or size. Project managers can custom permissions on the documents that allow only selective employees to edit. Besides, the version control allows the users to remain updated while working on the project. It helps avoid errors and ensures that everyone is working with the updated documents. It tracks and controls processes from designing and construction to project completion. The tracking of the documents helps report real-time analysis and finds bottlenecks and helps take actions to prevent delays.
Advanced Communications and Forums: The standardized digital process provides project-wide access and visibility. You can configure the system to the process that helps to capture the data in an accurate format when designing or while creating fields. The mail routing automates the business process that minimizes the chance of creating human error. It easily tracks communications, remains updated on the progress, and reduces RFI turnaround times by 50%. In addition, it records the project automatically, which cannot be deleted and provides an unalterable audit trail facility.
Cost Management: You can track the project, portfolio performance, and costs with various analysis tools. You can take corrective actions at the earliest as it provides visibility into budgets and forecasts. It has unlimited work breakdown structure elements, work packages, and control accounts to track and report on the project level. To forecast your costs, you have the flexibility to use cost-performance-index (CPI) and schedule-performance-index (SPI).
BIM Management: Aocnex features collaborative features that allow the project managers and team members to view and edit the projects. The out-of-the-box dashboards and reports help improve visibility and tracking of the performance. According to the organizational needs, you can configure reports and dashboards and refine the reports. You can map the dashboards to your organization to track it better and control and optimize its critical processes.
Quality and Safety Processes: With Aconex Field, you can automate and standardize any inspection like the mobile app for safety walks, defecting, quality checks, and more. To eliminate paper inefficiencies, you can use Aconex Field to complete the documents in the existing forms. In addition, the visual dashboards in the system provide deep insights at the project or organizational level that minimizes delays by recognizing the issues early in the project. Therefore, you can capture the problem data, customize issue tracking, and focus on areas that require improvement.
Pros and Cons
Listed are the pros and cons that are curated based according to the user’s review from the review sites:
Pros:
User Friendly: Oracle Aconex is a cloud-based solution that is easy to use and intuitive for users. It is a platform that helps to collaborate and communicate among the participants. A large number of users can be added to collaborate. The users can verify and preview the documents before deciding to download them. The documents can be sorted according to date and organization, making the software user-friendly.
Document Management: Aconex allows the users to store the documents securely for any project. It is easy to search and find documents, especially the current versions. But the documents cannot be deleted from the system. It also allows multiple fields to search for drawings and documents such as date, subjects, recipients, and organization.
Functionality: Aconex offers robust document management tools for the construction industry that makes the workflows easier and manageable. It complies with the internal needs and allows the organizations to remain updated. In addition, it has tools that are used to capture, organize, store, preserve and disseminate content and related documents which makes the organization soar in productivity and efficiency.
Usability: It makes the managing process in the organization more manageable. It can record every change made in the documents and the system. The dashboard provides all the relevant information required to manage the daily tasks. In addition, it helps to upload documents in bulk. This software helps document control functions, and the repository provides the best experience.
Support: The support teams are responsive 24/7 no matter where you contact from.
Cons:
Mobile App: Aconex users state that it is not always seamless or better than relying on email. Sometimes it is slow in its functionality, and it becomes slower when uploading bulk documents.
Learning Curve: Aconex users also state that the tools and functions given in the systems require additional training as using all the features may be difficult.
Permission Management: Users mentioning user permissions state that if the permissions are not set correctly, the users can access unrelated or unauthorized documents, which creates security vulnerabilities.
Limitations: It has glitches and errors, and sometimes finding the relevant files may get difficult. When the system is required during peak usage hours, service maintenance causes the software to go offline, creating difficulties in the organizational work.
Conclusion
Thus, with Oracle’s Aconex, a cloud-based system, you can secure the essential documents required for the organizational needs and help teams collaborate and modify items in the project without much difficulty while also providing features that can eliminate the risks of losing the data. The data in the system can never be removed or deleted, which ensures your data is safe and you can retrieve it when necessary
