Mott MacDonald

The Power BI dashboard embedded within Morta became a daily resource for over 500 team members across more than 30 design disciplines, providing real-time visibility into deliverable status that previously required chasing updates through email and spreadsheets. What used to take months to set up for a new project , configuring an MIDP, training teams, establishing tracking , was reduced to weeks on the pilot. The team believes future rollouts can be done in days using template duplication.

Automating the IDP process eliminated the manual errors that plagued Excel. The Aconex integration refreshes daily, showing reservation status without anyone needing to update Morta manually. The SharePoint integration tracks whether working files exist for each deliverable. Both sit alongside deliverables in a single view, giving teams instant visibility without switching systems.

The audit trail proved its value almost immediately. When a user reported a deliverable had been altered beyond recognition, the team filtered by user in Power BI, saw every action taken on that row, and explained the full history in minutes rather than the hours it would have taken to untangle in Excel. And by combining usage metrics with project data, the team could measure not just who logged in, but who was actively creating, updating, or archiving deliverables , giving direct insight into whether training was translating into real behaviour change.

During the early design phases of a subway extension project, Excel worked fine. But as the project moved into new design phases, deliverables were expected to skyrocket past 10,000 , and Excel simply couldn’t handle the volume. Files became slow, error-prone, and difficult to maintain.

The openness that made Excel familiar also made it dangerous. Too many people could go in and change things , adding columns unnecessarily, modifying data without anyone knowing. The information management team would have to go back in, lock it down, and undo changes, burning significant time on cleanup rather than delivery. There was no audit trail, so if a deliverable was altered beyond recognition, tracking down what happened was a manual investigation with no guaranteed answer.

Mott MacDonald had tried building a bespoke solution before. On High Speed 2, the team created a custom database with a web app that worked well for that project , but it was built specifically for HS2 and proved impractical to transfer anywhere else. They needed something configurable enough to reuse across projects without rebuilding from scratch each time. Meanwhile, design teams across 30 disciplines relied on disconnected tools for task management and tracking, with no single source of truth connecting the MIDP to the CDE, the programme schedule, or reporting.

Morta occupied a sweet spot the team had been searching for: more powerful than Excel, more flexible than a custom-built database. It gave them the familiarity of spreadsheets with the control of a structured system.

Work package managers and discipline leads populate deliverables directly into Morta. Document numbers are auto-generated as users fill in columns , originator, document type, discipline, work package , eliminating manual number assignment and enforcing data quality at the point of entry. The team set up a two-view workflow: one editable view for populating deliverables, and a second read-only view filtering those not yet reserved in Aconex. Users export from the second view and send directly to document control.

Aconex integration was a one-click setup. Document metadata flows into Morta and refreshes daily, automatically showing reservation status alongside each deliverable without document control needing to update anything manually. A separate Power Automate flow scans the SharePoint design library, captures file metadata, and populates a linked table in Morta , creating a column that shows whether each deliverable’s working file exists in SharePoint. Power BI dashboards pull data directly from Morta and are embedded within the platform, so 500-plus team members across 30 design disciplines can check progress without leaving Morta. And the audit trail data, piped into Power BI, lets the team track exactly who changed what and when , something that was simply impossible in Excel.

Moving from Excel to a new system was a significant change for the design teams. Weekly training sessions provided hands-on guidance, discussing updates and new features while making people comfortable inputting directly into Morta.

The team deliberately kept the document control reservation step manual rather than fully automating the Morta-to-Aconex flow. Not everything added to Morta is ready to be reserved , there’s a review exercise first, and automating too early would have removed an important quality gate. With the pilot refined, the plan is to duplicate the workspace for other projects, iron out inefficiencies, and create a standard template that rolls out across the division and the company. Samuel and Mariano’s advice is direct: always bring the people, speak to them, understand their concerns, and respond to their feedback. Don’t just set the tool up and hope for the best , while Morta can provide the technology and set up a process, the people bit is still important to remember.