Arup empowered by Cintoo Cloud

• 6,000+ scans uploaded since 2019
• ~10-min client onboarding
• No more hard-drive transfers

Arup is a global engineering and design firm with roughly 16,000 people working across more than 140 countries, and its teams had invested in multiple terrestrial laser scanners to capture as-built conditions on projects. The problem was distribution: getting those large point cloud datasets in front of the right people, internally and externally, without everyone needing specialist software or powerful workstations just to open the files.

Arup chose Cintoo Cloud because it let teams host scan data in the cloud and give stakeholders browser-based access to view, measure, and analyze the as-built scans, including overlaying BIM models in IFC format, without a site visit or any specialized viewing software installed locally.

As a firm operating across more than 140 countries, Arup needed a way to get reality capture data in front of internal teams, clients, external architects, subcontractors, and BIM managers, no matter where each person was or what equipment they had.

Sharing point clouds through hard drives and generic file transfers meant every recipient had to have both the storage capacity and the specialist software to open large scan files, which was rarely guaranteed, especially for people outside Arup's own technical teams. That created a real barrier to project transparency, since clients and collaborators who could most benefit from seeing as-built conditions were often the least likely to have the tools to actually view the data themselves.

Before adopting Cintoo Cloud, Arup's teams relied on portable hard drives as their main way of sharing point cloud data captured by their terrestrial laser scanners. Getting a scan to a colleague, a client, or an external architect meant physically copying it onto a hard drive or uploading it to a generic file-sharing platform, and then hoping the recipient had a workstation powerful enough, and the right specialist software installed, to actually open and work with the file.

In many cases, project stakeholders downloaded large point cloud datasets only to discover they lacked the computing power or software needed to view, manage, or manipulate them, which slowed down collaboration and limited who could realistically access the data.

Since adopting Cintoo Cloud, Arup has uploaded more than 6,000 scans to the platform, and teams across Australasia, the UK, and the US now use it as a core part of their reality capture workflow. According to Arup, new users can be onboarded to the platform in about 10 minutes, which has made it far easier to bring clients, external architects, subcontractors, and BIM managers into the process rather than keeping scan data confined to Arup's own technical staff.

That shift has eliminated the need to physically move data on portable hard drives, delivered real time and cost savings by letting people view and measure builds virtually instead of visiting the site, and increased project transparency, since stakeholders can now walk through the as-built model themselves and immediately understand the scope of the work.