Digital Transformation at Axpo Grid

The Problem

Building Information Modelling is reshaping how infrastructure gets planned and built — standard in more than 40 countries, and in Switzerland a baseline expectation on any serious project. But in the utility sector capital is traditionally invested in physical assets, and digital engineering reads to finance as operational overhead with unclear return. The task was to introduce BIM and digital twins not as a research experiment, but as a critical, margin-improving service for the construction and operation of power networks.

The Execution

We ran this as expectation management and process transformation, not as a software architecture problem. Each capability had to prove its value before the next one followed, and the work started from the immediate downstream pain of the construction teams rather than from the preferences of whoever held the budget.

I built the vision and strategy to carry BIM and digital twins into a group of 400 stakeholders — asset managers, engineers, procurement and sales officers — and stood up the organisation to own them, with a team built overseas to sustain delivery. Every capability went in alongside the process change it required and the training that came with it, because the tooling was never what decided adoption.

The Result