Shared knowledge is the key to a thriving utility sector, and the future demands teams who can see, trust, and act on the same data. STOWE Australia is on a mission to break down the silo.
To meet Australia’s rapidly accelerating renewable energy targets, contractors and utilities are being pushed to deliver more infrastructure, faster than ever before. Projects are becoming larger and more complex, yet budgets are becoming tighter, timelines more aggressive and new expectations are emerging around transparency and coordination.
As one of Australia’s leading industrial electrical contractors, STOWE Australia is at the forefront of this shift and knows all too well the criticality of digital transformation of their work, to maintain their reputation for performance. At the end of 2019, the STOWE team recognised it was time for change. After more than a century of operations, the company had accumulated legacy systems and fragmented knowledge across long-serving teams.
National Digital Engineering Manager, Matt Fern, said at that time, the team felt their information silos were evident. This was causing difficulty to maintain consistency and efficiency across branches – organisation wide.
“We were facing an extremely experienced workforce with immense knowledge and leading methodologies, yet no simple way to capture it and unify it across the company,” Fern said. “Without a central system to store and share that information, we knew we risked losing it as our workforce evolved.”
To solve this, STOWE set out to build a common data environment that could be used throughout the entire business across all states, teams and disciplines. With rapid growth projected for the Australian energy sector and increasing demand for large-scale, complex projects, STOWE knew it couldn’t afford to fall behind. The move positioned them at the forefront of digital adoption in their industry, helping them maintain a competitive edge while keeping pace with client expectations and sector innovation.
Driving digital change at scale
At the time of their transformation journey Engineering Manager Sean Dawson had been with STOWE for 17 years and had seen firsthand how important continuity and shared knowledge were to delivery.
“Clients came to us because they had confidence we could deliver large and complex projects with certainty. At the time, our own confidence in this was really reliant on us reinventing our own working environment. To maintain that, we needed one environment where every person could access accurate, up-to-date information and where critical IP stayed within the business,” Dawson said.
STOWE selected Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) as its central platform for models, drawings, issues, schedules and field records. Implementing ACC across 1,500 people in 15 branches required careful change management to ensure the technology worked for everyone, not just a few early adopters. To support this rollout, STOWE partnered with ARKANCE, MONNOYEUR Group’s digital transformation subsidiary, who guided the implementation, led onboarding and training, and helped embed the system across the business.
“We knew we needed someone who had experience delivering this kind of transformation while we still had to keep projects moving,” Fern said. “So we began partnering with ARKANCE. They worked alongside us day-to-day, travelling to branches, training teams and helping us embed the change in a way that felt practical and achievable. It never felt like an outside consultant, it truly felt like a partnership.”
Construction Sales Manager, Brett Bridgman, ARKANCE ANZ said the approach they took was to focus on keeping the entire digital transformation journey at a people-led level.
“STOWE recognised early that for their digital transformation to be genuinely effective, it needed to bring their people on the journey. One of their biggest barriers to progress was fragmented legacy systems and siloed information, so it was critical to find a way to bring all the historical knowledge together to set them up for the future. For this to succeed, they needed to be transparent with their people the entire way,” Bridgman said.
“Our role really became about helping them unlock the value of the data they already had. It was all there, it just so happened to be in lots of different places across lots of different people – so we had to bring it together whilst making sure their team felt empowered, not overwhelmed.”
“Our relationship with Stowe Australia goes beyond a single project, it’s a partnership founded on shared trust, collaboration, and commitment”.
From data capture to better decisions
With ACC in place and supported by ARKANCE, STOWE began entering and managing project data just once, which improved accuracy, reduced manual effort, and allowed field teams to focus on delivery instead of chasing documents. The shared environment also enabled better internal and external collaboration.
Fast forward to today, and with STOWE’s transformation fully implemented, their new day-to-day looks very different. Teams now partner with clients and consultants earlier in the design phase.
“We started involving clients and consultants earlier in the design phase,” Dawson said. “That reduced late variations, strengthened relationships, and gave us confidence in how we planned and installed modular work because everyone was aligned from the start.”
This collaboration-first approach has transformed project delivery, allowing teams to work more efficiently and make decisions with greater confidence throughout the process.
The way forward
With the foundations now in place, STOWE is starting to explore how its data can offer a clearer picture of what’s happening across projects – where time is being spent, what’s slowing teams down and where there are opportunities to work smarter.
“We finally have the ability to structure and use our data in ways that weren’t possible before,” Fern said. “But it’s an ongoing journey – technology is evolving faster than anyone can predict.”
For both Fern and Dawson, the success of this shift has always come back to people, not platforms.
“Technology only works if it genuinely helps people do their jobs better,” Dawson said. “When teams experience those wins firsthand, the entire business benefits.”
Looking ahead, the focus is on continuity and making sure the knowledge built over decades doesn’t disappear when people move on, becoming part of the way the business works for the long term.
“A business is only as old as the data it can reference,” Fern said. “If it takes five or six years to deliver one major project, you can’t wait to start collecting that data. You have to start now.”
For operators who are looking to begin their digital transformation or scale existing processes Bridgman says that the journey starts with a simple conversation, an opportunity to explore what’s possible with an expert in the space.
“Our team works side-by-side with our clients to ensure the change is practical, grounded and measurable,” he said. “If you’d like to explore what that could look like for your organisation, we’d be happy to talk.”
