How Premise Improved Collaboration, Security and Mobility with a Common Data Environment
As a growing consultancy with more than 150 staff across 13 offices, Premise needed a more secure and efficient way to manage project information across multiple locations. By implementing 12d Synergy as a Common Data Environment, the business created a single source of truth for files and documents, improved collaboration across offices and remote teams, and reduced costs through greater mobility and lower IT infrastructure requirements.
Premise is a full-service engineering, design, and management consultancy providing solutions in areas that include urban development, transport, agriculture, energy, and surveying. The organization has over 150 staff across 13 offices in Australia, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea.
Consultant
Engineering and Infrastructure
Make project information easier to manage with 12d Synergy.
From documents and drawings to emails, models and workflows, 12d Synergy brings everything together in one secure system so your team can work more efficiently from day one.
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The Challenge
As Premise expanded across multiple offices and regions, the business needed a better way to work and collaborate across distributed teams. Before implementing 12d Synergy, Premise relied on local drives and Dropbox to manage files across offices. While workable at a small scale, this approach restricted file access, created duplication and corruption risks, and introduced security concerns when third-party contractors and joint venture partners needed to be involved.
The business needed a Common Data Environment that could provide a single source of truth for files and documents, support secure collaboration across offices and remote staff, and improve the speed and reliability of data access for large files and datasets.
The Solutions
Premise implemented 12d Synergy as a central and secure Common Data Environment for project files, documents and business data. Instead of relying on disconnected local storage and file-sharing tools, teams could now work from one standardized environment accessible across offices, from home, on site or with approved external collaborators.
The platform also introduced stronger permission controls, version history and auditability. Files could be checked out to individual users, locked while being edited, and rolled back if needed, helping eliminate the risks associated with duplicated, corrupted or out-of-date information.
As the business matured its use of the platform, 12d Synergy also supported a shift to cloud infrastructure. After migrating to Microsoft Azure and linking with 12d Synergy file replication servers, Premise improved performance for remote locations while reducing the scale of IT infrastructure required across the business.
The Result
- Improved collaboration across 13 offices and 150+ staff in Australia, Vietnam and Papua New Guinea.
- Saved around $240,000 per year through reduced fly-in/fly-out costs and lower IT infrastructure requirements.
- Created a stronger single source of truth for project files and documents.
- Improved security and access control when working with third-party contractors and joint partners.
- Enabled faster data transfers for large files and datasets across remote locations.
- Increased workforce mobility and flexibility across offices, home and project sites.
“Out of all our software, 12d Synergy’s support is by far the best. 12d Synergy is far superior and far better bang for buck than any competing products. I’ll recommend 12d Synergy all day, every day… If we started this business from scratch, 12d Synergy would definitely be there. I couldn’t picture life without it.”
A growing multi-office business needed a stronger Common Data Environment
For Premise, the challenge was not tied to a single project, but to the way information moved across the business as it grew. With teams spread across Australia, Vietnam and Papua New Guinea, the company needed a more secure and scalable operating model for collaboration, document control and data access.
That makes the real spotlight here Premise’s wider CDE transformation. Rather than continuing to rely on local drives and individual file-sharing tools, the business created a more structured environment that could support internal teams, remote staff and external collaborators in a more controlled way.
Spotlight: Building a single source of truth across 13 offices
One of the most important outcomes for Premise was the creation of a centralized, standardized location for company data, documents and files. Whether staff were working together from different offices, accessing data from site, or working from home, they could do so from one secure environment.
This gave the business a stronger single source of truth and reduced the problems that had previously come from disconnected file-sharing methods. It also improved operational flexibility, allowing quieter offices to support busier ones and helping specialist skills move more easily across locations to meet delivery demands.
Strengthening security, traceability and control
As a business working across multiple offices and with third-party contractors and joint partners, Premise also needed stronger control over who could access and edit information. 12d Synergy addressed this through permission controls and version history, giving the business a more secure environment for collaboration.
Files could be checked out to individual users, preventing simultaneous conflicting edits, while every version was recorded and could be rolled back if required. This improved data integrity and reduced the risks of duplication, corruption and uncertainty over which version was current.
Enabling mobility and reducing infrastructure costs
Beyond collaboration and control, 12d Synergy also gave Premise greater mobility. Staff could work from home, remotely, or across different offices more easily, helping the business become more agile while also supporting employee wellbeing and workforce flexibility.
The move to Microsoft Azure, combined with 12d Synergy’s file replication capability, also reduced the amount of infrastructure the business needed to maintain internally. This enabled faster data transfers for remote offices and contributed to a measurable reduction in IT costs, alongside savings in travel through less reliance on fly-in/fly-out support.
Premise is a full-service engineering, design, and management consultancy providing solutions in areas that include urban development, transport, agriculture, energy, and surveying. The organization has over 150 staff across 13 offices in Australia, Vietnam, and Papua New Guinea.
Consultant
Engineering and Infrastructure
Make project information easier to manage with 12d Synergy.
From documents and drawings to emails, models and workflows, 12d Synergy brings everything together in one secure system so your team can work more efficiently from day one.
Book a DemoPositioned for more flexible and efficient growth
For Premise, 12d Synergy became more than a file management solution. It provided a more secure, flexible and scalable Common Data Environment for a growing multi-office business.
By strengthening collaboration, improving security and reducing the cost and friction of working across locations, the platform helped Premise create a more agile operating model — one better suited to growth, distributed teams and modern project delivery.