Bouygues TP Murphy JV

Mo Shana’a: Now we’re going to have Thibaud and Euan join us from they’re working on Lower Thames Crossing and the delivery of that. And I think it’s a very good example again, of collaboration in a different way across different parties. Partly because they’re a joint venture. And honestly, you’ll see what I mean in a second, they blow my mind every single time I see their projects.

So I’m really looking forward to seeing them, to having them share their experience with you.

Thibaud Guerrero: Thank you. So as Mo said today we’re going to talk about the Lower Thames Crossing project. Different approach. We’re not talking about company-wide implementation. We were just working on one project, but there’s aspects of it that will probably resonate with what happened already. So the idea for today will be to talk about why we’re using Morta on Lower Thames Crossing. Also how we’ve laid the foundations together with Euan. And then how from those foundations we’re now expanding and improving our use of Morta.

So I’m Thibaud. I’ve been mostly working in the UK actually, on previous big infrastructure projects. And Euan Evans. I work for ARUP, part of the design JV for this project. And I work on a lot of our major transport projects within the UK.

So we can’t really talk about Lower Thames Crossing without talking about the Dartford Crossing. The crossing today has 50 million crossings a year, and the volumes are increasing. The purpose of the Lower Thames Crossing ultimately is to release the strain on the Dartford Crossing with the opportunity to build a new highway.

So it will be a 70 miles per hour highway with multiple vehicle types. It will span across the Thames. They have nearly doubled the capacity with those three lane connections. The traffic in Dartford will also be reduced by 20%.

The project itself is split into three sections. There’s the southern section where Skanska is delivering the works. We have the northern section where Balfour Beatty is also busy delivering the works. Our section is the tunnel approaches section, where the Bouygues TP Murphy JV is currently working.

Our ultimate client is National Highways. We are with Bouygues Travaux Publics and Murphy Joint Venture. And our designers are ARUP, Mott MacDonald, but also TP because as a contractor we also like to design our own tunnels.

The scope: we will do a 4.2 kilometre long twin bored tunnel. We’re talking big diameter, 15 plus metres with three lanes of traffic in each tunnel. Cross passages along the way. Portal structures that will host buildings. And our contract is really a multidisciplinary contract, so we are dealing with everything — landscaping, tunnel, civil works, the road itself, all the systems.

Now, onto Morta. We recognised starting Lower Thames Crossing, there’s that gap that exists in the industry between some people pushing forward with lakehouse and warehouse and AI and drones, and the reality on site where Excel is still very present. And we’ve seen Morta as a way to bridge that gap in the middle.

Why we’ve chosen Morta: it does work from the get go. It is useful to have systems that are plug and play that we don’t have to rely on heavy IT involvement. The system is open by nature and that’s something we value a lot. And the last point: we wanted to standardise the way we talk about things.

Euan Evans: So before we implemented Morta we had to bear the users in mind. We got hundreds of them on this project. So to get them moving out of this Excel world, we needed to put good practice in place.

Some of the key things: ensuring we had project-wide column header colours, putting in consistent RAG colours, looking at how we categorise everything, how we name our tables, documents, and fields. And how to navigate when people first land in Morta.

So we then looked at let’s start small but with a big aim in mind. One of the first things that we needed to get in place was an information delivery plan. TIDPs. Then from that, what did we want to achieve — the MIDP connecting to CDE systems and potentially other systems.

We have a lot of information standards driving the MIDP. On this project we have ProjectWise from the design perspective, and then Asite from the contractor perspective. On top of that, the key thing within the MIDP is the P6 programme.

Thibaud Guerrero: Maybe just adding one thing. Our approach with the MIDP has been different to what we’ve seen on other projects. We use Morta to create deliverables in our system. You cannot create a deliverable in Asite or ProjectWise unless you go through Morta. So it’s the entry point to everything, and it’s our key to maintain that source of truth.

Euan Evans: So by implementing this for the users, we developed a document that’s simple to go in and structure it in a way where they can access their design deliverables. We have a process in place, then that triggers an action. If the document code has been taken in the one system, then it’s the next available code that goes into the other system.

Once the TIDPs were up and running, we then looked at the level of information need. Or for our project, our project component catalogue. The task here was looking at how we take the information standards from the client and from the industry — bSDD, National Highways, Uniclass codes, carbon requirements — and how do we put a structure in place.

So from that, we were able to ingest all these information standards into the systems. Every discipline needed to go into Morta and create all the component catalogue. And then we can start linking these components to the asset requirements, to the carbon requirements, to Uniclass codes. We’ve been able to automate, configure, and then deliver IFC 4x3 files which are conforming to standards and are all being controlled by what we’ve done within the Morta system.

Thibaud Guerrero: So once our information became structured, the key enabler was to kind of try and free the programme. We all use Primavera P6 and it’s a very good tool. But when it comes to sharing that information, extracting that information, it’s always challenging.

So the idea really for us was to use Morta as a way to free the programme. Our planning team is really one of our biggest users of Morta. Because it allows them to stop using individual XER exports and copy pasting. Doing it in Morta allows us to centralise information in one place.

And then we think that we’re at that stage now where we start building brick by brick. We started with consent tracking, because consent is one of the key things on our project. What was interesting is we started with “can we have the consent register in Morta?” Having the register in Morta is nothing better than having it in Excel. But the register became a tracker because people could see live updates of plan versus actual.

We’ve been working with our procurement team. We added temporary works packaging and so on. One thing, when something gets defined once in Morta, it’s defined once and then we reuse it across everything. It’s the master data management of the poor, if you could put it like that.

What we see a lot is people have ownership of what they’re doing. They can create their own views, they can organise their information. If we’re trying to replace Excel, we can’t say people stop using Excel, but at the same time, you’re not going to use Morta. Someone else is going to use it for you. That notion of builders — we’re developing that community throughout the project.

Euan Evans: So looking at "should it be Morta or not?" We highlighted five key things. Is it a new data set? Will it interact with other data sets? How is it being shared? Does it need permission management? How are we tracking it?

Thibaud Guerrero: To finalise, Morta is sold as a no-code solution, but we do actually use quite a bit of code. We want to be in that no-code environment for the end user, but having the ability for ourselves to go beyond that.

One thing we’ve also lived was initially we approached Morta as a database. But then the UI aspect comes into play and we’re reflecting on whether Morta is really a database or not. Morta sits really between the application and the database.

The flexibility of Morta is amazing, but it’s very easy to start creating monsters. It really requires a high level of organisation and vision.

And this notion of openness. Communicating with the community to say, we’ve done these things, but it shouldn’t be on top of Morta, it should be in Morta. That’s helped us drive the product in a direction we think it should go. And the community is active, is engaging, is talking to each other.

Mo Shana’a: Honestly that was amazing. I think you have the benefit of also being a joint venture, but the implementation on the project is the single best project I have personally seen. Holistically, like the range of things that you’ve built on it. Your approach, the metaphor of like brick by brick.

Thibaud Guerrero: I think we ask ourselves a lot of time. We’re at that stage now where we do ask that question very often because the answer is not always Morta.

Mo Shana’a: Really appreciate you sharing and really appreciate the insights that you shared. Thank you both so, so much Thibaud and Euan for sharing all of this with us.