How Did the City of Newcastle Achieve Rapid Digital Transformation During COVID-19 with 12d Synergy?

The City of Newcastle’s journey with 12d Synergy is a story of rapid transformation driven by opportunity and necessity. A series of organisational changes—including new leadership, modern design tools, a technology-enabled workplace, and flexible working practices—created the foundation for a digital shift that would reshape how the engineering team worked.

When COVID-19 forced the team to work remotely, managing large engineering datasets became an urgent challenge. 12d Synergy provided the solution, enabling the City of Newcastle to maintain productivity with secure data management, faster file access, version control, and seamless collaboration. Remarkably, the platform was implemented across the design and survey teams within just four weeks.

What started as a response to remote working evolved into a long-term transformation. Through phased adoption, the City expanded its use of 12d Synergy for project data management, email organisation, task tracking, and collaboration. The result was a more connected, efficient, and future-ready approach to managing engineering projects.

As a key contractor within the Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team (SCIRT), SCIRT (https://scirtlearninglegacy.org.nz/) leveraged 12d Model to help deliver one of New Zealand’s largest post-earthquake infrastructure reconstruction projects, restoring critical roads, water networks, and essential services across Christchurch.

The $2 billion rebuilding of Christchurch is one of the biggest and most complex civil engineering projects New Zealand has ever seen.

The city was hit by four major earthquakes over 10 months, the magnitude 6.3 quake in February 2011 being the most destructive.

The earthquakes resulted in the loss of 181 lives, and caused unprecedented damage that left the 376,000 residents without even basic infrastructure and services.

The massive rebuild task has started, and the design teams at work on restoring the devastated infrastructure needed to choose the right civil software.

They chose 12d Model — because it provides the best integrated package for surveying, preliminary and detailed design, construction and producing as-built drawings.

The project is being carried out by the Stronger Christchurch Infrastructure Rebuild Team (SCIRT), an alliance involving Christchurch City Council, Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA), City Care, Downer, Fletcher Construction, Fulton Hogan, and MacDow New Zealand. It will also see major involvement from GHD, URS, Sinclair Knight Merz, Beca Opus and Eliot Sinclair.

And 12d Model will be helping the SCIRT teams across the alliance tackle a huge amount of work, in a project that will take at least five years.

An estimated $2.5 billion worth of replacements or repairs are needed to more than 200km of roads and 800km of pipes for water, wastewater and stormwater, as well as a large number of water reservoirs, bridges and public parks.

“12d Model is being used as the civil engineering database and for all the civil engineering functions including the surveying, drainage and sewer design and road design,” 12d Solutions Managing Director Lee Gregory said.

To help with the vast rebuild effort, 12d NZ are currently conducting “train the trainer” courses for drainage and civil design, and training for the SCIRT 12d Lead Designers.

“All the surveying is being done for SCIRT by consultants using 12d Model,” he said.

New Zealand government Earthquake Recovery Minister, Gerry Brownlee, said Canterbury had been amazingly resilient over recent months, with residents willing to make changes to meet the challenges of the devastated areas.

“Through earthquakes and snowstorms the city is still getting up and going to work,” Mr Brownlee said.

“Despite all they‘ve been through I believe confidence is growing among Cantabrians, and with good reason.”

Download this Case Study as a PDF HERE

In this short tutorial, we show you how to create and manage Env_configs.4d in 12d Model to simplify license management across different workflows. By creating multiple environments within a single configuration file, you can quickly switch between licenses for surveying, road design, drainage, GIS, and other disciplines without changing your software setup.

Each environment overrides only the required settings, primarily the nodes.4d and dongles.4d files. While the nodes.4d file typically remains the same across all environments, the dongles.4d file changes depending on the license required. Once configured, the file can be stored on a shared server, allowing users to select the appropriate environment when opening a project.

When 12d Model starts, it automatically references the license associated with the selected environment, whether it is hosted locally or on a network. Users can verify the active environment and license through the startup output window or the Help > About 12d Model dialog.

Watch the full tutorial to learn how to create Environment Configuration files, switch between license environments, and streamline license access in 12d Model.

I caught up with Dylan Revell of 12d NZ earlier this week to chat about the Design Quick Start options and Design Quick Tools in 12d Model.

The 12d Model Design Quick suite of options allows Users to create a 3D design Model with a one-button selection on a 3D string.

Users can utilise the pre-installed design profiles and pavement styles or create custom profiles to their own Company or Regional standards and place them on a user defined toolbar.

Quick Tools can populate and dynamically measure start and end positions for designs, remove unwanted links through intersections and turn sub-surface pavements on and off.

It truly means you can have your Apply Functions and MTF files created and running with a single click and ready to start editing.

You can watch the video here.

–Lisa Stewart

I caught up with 12d Model Programmer Callum Peaker yesterday to chat about updates to the Automated Catchment Delineation functionality in 12d Model 15 (a feature available from c1r onwards to 12d Modellers on Maintenance who have the Drainage String and Drainage Analysis modules activated).

First showcased at the 2024 12d Tech Forum, Automated Catchment Delineation has received many improvements over the past six months. This webinar aims to showcase some of the new features and changes to the tool, as well as a brief overview of catchment creation from start to finish. Auto Catchment Delineation receives ongoing development informed by user feedback and suggestions.

The video of our chat is available here.