Sensat, British Land and their delivery partners create a “digital twin” in major step towards Canada Water Masterplan

Golden thread of information provides the missing link for overarching site accessibility, planning and coordination for the length of the scheme

London, UK – 25 November 2021: Sensat, the leading visualisation and collaboration software company for civil infrastructure, has successfully mapped and brought together all past, present, and future data of Canada Water’s 53-acre site in one digital replica, working with partners British Land, a leading UK property development and investment company, and Amodal, information management firm for the built environment. Providing an up-to-date visual resource, Sensat is ensuring British Land and their delivery partners can better understand the site and its constraints to expedite options appraisal process, feasibility reporting, and risk evaluations.

Embarking on an ambitious £4billion project to redevelop Canada Water’s 53-acre site, British Land, in partnership with Southwark Council, are developing an outstanding new town centre for Southwark and London communities that complements the local area, making an active, positive, long-term contribution to local life. As part of the Canada Water Masterplan, British Land selected Amodal and Sensat to provide a complete overview of the entire site, where multiple teams and project stakeholders can easily visualise site conditions without having to be on site, supporting project decision-making, contingency planning, and frictionless collaboration.

“The ability to both accurately scan the site, and confidently pull together lots of disparate data into one single platform, is amazingly powerful. The speed of iteration really helps for quicker options appraisal, more efficient handover processes, and better clash detection to reduce contingency costs. It’s been an invaluable resource when thinking through phasing,” said David Walters, Programme Director at British Land. “Adopting a Common Visualisation Environment® (CVE), such as Sensat’s, enhances our visualisation capability and has proven instrumental when it comes to data validation. By scanning the site using drones, and displaying this highly-accurate data in Sensat’s platform, we have been able to establish disparities between the actual locations of assets and their previously documented locations. Spotting problems early, ahead of the design phase, means we can significantly reduce the level of risk contingency costs, which could easily be into the millions.”

Amodal was commissioned by British Land to help them translate the complexity of the project, and all its building information and processes into the digital world in order to continually evolve and identify efficiencies throughout the lifecycle of the project. “Organising all historical and current project information into a CVE takes having an oversight of the multiple data layers that make up a project, up to a new visual level,” said Thomas Whiting, Managing Director at Amodal.” Sensat was able to complement the data sets used on British Land’s existing software to enhance the visualisation and user functionality of current (and future) data sets, providing a seamless transition from an existing Common Data Environment (CDE) to CVE. This golden thread of information is allowing for better stakeholder engagement, collaboration, and integration across teams.”

“Being part of one of the largest mixed-use regeneration projects in London has demonstrated how bringing all the right information together can really change the dynamic of a project for the better. A masterplan of this cost and scale could easily become fragmented, falling foul to misaligned incentives, behaviours, and objectives, as well as delayed delivery timetables due to unreliable data, but we have helped overcome this and accelerate planning,” said James Dean, CEO at Sensat. “It’s only when you see comprehensive information on existing assets, above- and below-ground utilities and infrastructure, as well as surveys and inspections, visually in one place that you can support collective problem-solving and mitigate the risks. We look forward to continuing to be a key enabler for smart planning to help partners build better and see the ​​wider knock-on benefits this will have on other stakeholders linked to the masterplan.”