Van Norel Bouwgroep

Five tools became one source of truth, and the subs actually log in.

How Van Norel Bouwgroep put project information, BIM collaboration and quality assurance in one place, and what changed once they did.

Aerial view of Van Norel Bouwgroep's Boeghaven housing project under construction in Zeewolde, with scaffolding and wind turbines on the horizon.

The project in one panel.

The facts a peer in your shoes scans first: who they are, what they build, and which parts of Catenda they put to work.

Company: Van Norel Bouwgroep
Sector: General contractor
Region: Epe, Netherlands
Size: ~80 employees, family-owned
Project: Residential, healthcare, commercial, recreational and industrial, incl. Leeuwenburgh (Heerde) and Boeghaven / Bij de Sluis (Zeewolde)
Products used: Catenda Hub
Catenda Site
BIM & quality assurance

Before Catenda, the project lived in five tools.

Van Norel Bouwgroep develops, builds, manages and maintains construction projects across residential, healthcare, commercial, recreational and industrial sectors. As part of its digitalization strategy, the company needed a single, central source for all project information and communication, one that prevented errors and simplified the records required for quality assurance.

Operations Manager Wout Oost and BIM Manager Daniël van der Voort set out to find it, with ease of use, open standards and Dutch-language support as the decisive factors, the things that would determine whether everyone actually adopted it.

“To continue safeguarding those core values in the digital age, we went looking for the best common data environment (CDE) for our organization.”

Wout Oost, Operations Manager, Van Norel Bouwgroep

What they did with Catenda.

A cross-departmental working group, estimating, project management, work preparation and site execution, narrowed a longlist down to three suppliers with help from an external partner. Catenda came out on top, and two pilots confirmed the choice: one on the work-preparation phase (new-build apartments Leeuwenburgh in Heerde) and one on the execution phase (new-build homes Boeghaven in Zeewolde).

Catenda replaced five separate applications and became the central common data environment for project information and communication. On site, the team is among the first Dutch users to view 3D models and register completion points directly from a tablet.

What changed once the project had one source of truth.

Five separate applications collapsed into one CDE, and adoption moved faster than anyone expected, Van Norel signed a corporate license after just six months. The biggest win is easy access to the latest version of every document, which prevents errors and simplifies the records needed for quality assurance.

Enthusiasm reached past their own staff to the architects, engineers and subcontractors they work with, and on site the team now views 3D models and registers completion points digitally from a tablet.

The experience that employees who were initially critical of a new solution are now working with it enthusiastically is the best confirmation for us that we made the right choice. Because acceptance and learning to work with it went faster than expected, we signed a corporate license after just six months.