The client needed to manage document workflows, approvals, and model coordination across a wide supply chain involving primary designers, delivery partners, and contractors, each with different systems, maturity levels, and working practices.
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Our client is one of the UK's largest publicly owned utilities, responsible for delivering critical infrastructure services to millions of households and businesses. To meet an ambitious multi-year capital investment programme - spanning treatment plants, network upgrades, and smart infrastructure, the organisation required a robust, ISO 19650-compliant Common Data Environment capable of supporting thousands of internal and supply-chain users across a complex, multi-organisation delivery model. VE3 designed and delivered a two-layer platform solution: Oracle Aconex as the CDE of record (SaaS on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure), combined with VE3-XIL, a single-tenant integration and experience layer running on Microsoft Azure.
The client needed to manage document workflows, approvals, and model coordination across a wide supply chain involving primary designers, delivery partners, and contractors, each with different systems, maturity levels, and working practices.
Ensuring that all information produced across the programme met ISO 19650 standards, covering naming conventions, metadata schemas, and approval workflows, required platform-enforced governance, not reliance on individual discipline.
The programme needed to scale from an initial 500-1,000 users to approximately 4,000 external collaborators without proportionally increasing CDE licensing costs as the supply chain expanded.
As a critical public infrastructure programme, the client required 24×7 platform availability, enterprise-grade disaster recovery, and a tested business continuity posture, not just a hosted service.
The programme required a live, operational CDE within 10 business days of contract award, with full governance, user onboarding, and support structures in place from day one.
VE3 applied a configure-first, integrate-second, customise-last approach that prioritises speed of deployment and long-term maintainability. Oracle Aconex underpins all ISO 19650 document workflows, transmittals, and model coordination, while VE3-XIL on Azure provides the integration layer, analytics, and AI-powered search.
VE3-XIL was deployed active/active across Azure UK South availability zones with warm standby in UK West, achieving enterprise resilience and meeting the client’s RTO and RPO requirements without dependency on on-premises infrastructure.
A VE3-built read-only portal allows large ‘lookup’ audiences - operations staff, read-only contractors, and portal users, to access CDE content without incurring full transacting licences, reducing cost as the user base scaled to 4,000+.
Identity and access management was configured via Azure AD SSO and MFA for client staff, with flexible email-invite onboarding for supply-chain partners, enabling secure, scalable access across all organisations.
ISO 19650-compliant folder trees, metadata schemas, naming validators, and approval workflow templates were configured as reusable standards, deployable across the full programme portfolio to ensure consistency and reduce future configuration effort.
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Our platform combines the proven scale of Oracle Aconex with the flexibility of a Microsoft Azure integration layer, giving infrastructure clients a CDE that is both standards-compliant and commercially smart.
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