New Balance headquarter

• Faster field-to-office communication
• Digital markups replace paper notes
• 30% faster RFI turnaround

WSP's field engineers on the New Balance headquarters project at Boston Landing chose Newforma Project Center specifically for its mobile field capabilities. Rather than carrying notepads and cameras and transcribing observations back at the office, engineers used Newforma's iPad app to record site conditions, mark up drawings, and log issues directly in the field, syncing that information immediately into the shared project record.

This meant punch-list items and RFIs no longer sat idle until someone returned to a desk to write them up. WSP also valued Newforma's cross-office connectivity, which let the Boston Landing team collaborate seamlessly with colleagues at other WSP locations, keeping pace with the fast-moving design iteration typical of a complex, LEED Platinum BIM project. Together, the mobile tools and firmwide connectivity gave the team faster, more reliable communication between the jobsite and the office throughout construction.

New Balance's headquarters was an ambitious project on multiple fronts: a 250,000-square-foot building targeting LEED Platinum, with a hybrid HVAC system pairing underfloor air distribution with passive chilled beams that made it the first building in the country to achieve every available indoor environmental quality credit under its LEED rating system.

Delivering that level of performance required tight coordination between WSP's engineers, the architecture team, and the contractor. But the team's paper-based field process worked against that goal: site observations and markups had to be carried back to the office and manually logged before anyone else could act on them, slowing the RFI and submittal cycle at exactly the point in the schedule when fast, accurate communication mattered most.

Before adopting Newforma's mobile tools, WSP's field engineers documented site conditions on paper: handwritten notes, printed drawings marked up by hand, and photographs taken with a standalone camera or phone. That paper trail had to be physically carried back to the office, where someone would transcribe the notes, log RFIs, and file the photos into the project record.

On a fast-moving, multi-office project like Boston Landing, this created a lag between what happened on site and when the rest of the team could act on it, and it left more room for details to be lost or miscommunicated between the field and the design and coordination teams.

Switching WSP's field teams to Newforma's mobile apps removed the lag between what happened at the New Balance headquarters jobsite and when the rest of the project team could act on it. Instead of hand-carrying paper notes and photos back to the office to be transcribed, engineers logged site observations, markups, and RFIs from an iPad in real time, so issues reached the design and coordination teams the same day rather than after a delay.

That faster loop, combined with the cross-office connectivity Newforma gave WSP between its Boston Landing team and colleagues elsewhere in the firm, is a major reason WSP reports cutting the time it takes to receive, log, and respond to RFIs and submittals by roughly 30 percent, a meaningful gain on a fast-paced, design-intensive LEED Platinum project.