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How the Grand Egyptian Museum Delivered the Largest Archaeological Museum in the World

Industry

Government, Tourism, Cultural Heritage

HQ Location

Giza, Egypt

PMWEB modules

  • Reports
  • Budgets
  • Contracts & Invoices
  • Change Management
  • Drawing Sets/Lists
  • RFIs
  • Submittals
  • Document Management
  • Visual Workflow

Overview

Positioned beside the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Grand Egyptian Museum is one of the most significant cultural projects in modern history: a national icon preserving 7,000 years of heritage across a 500,000m² complex.

To deliver a program of this magnitude, the Ministry of Antiquities and Hill International standardized on PMWEB to manage cost, scope, schedule, and collaboration across global teams.

Results

$1B

capital value managed in PMWEB

7+

nations involved, including consultants, engineers, and ministries

20 years

from concept for inauguration

500,000m²

of museum and cultural complex

The Grand Egyptian Museum is the world’s largest museum dedicated to a single civilization, housing more than 100,000 artifacts, including the full Tutankhamun collection and monumental pieces like the 83-ton Ramses II statue.

The scale required world-class governance, unified information flows, and a single platform for decision-making.

The Outcome

A digitally enabled delivery model that unified stakeholders, maintained transparency, and accelerated decision-making on one of the most complex program environments in the world.

The Challenge

From a project controls perspective, GEM presented a unique set of complexities:

  • Multinational stakeholder environment: architects, conservators, engineers, global contractors, Egyptian government agencies.
  • Multilingual support (English & Arabic) for international delivery teams.
  • Scale of artefact movement, conservation and display: relocating tens of thousands of ancient items into a new facility with high preservation demands and international visibility.
  • Schedule & cost sensitivity: long duration (~20 years), multiple delays, public‐expectation risk, and tourism strategic importance.
  • Coordination of built infrastructure (massive building with 500,000 m² footprint), public access flows, heritage protection, international exhibitions, and new tourism infrastructure.
  • Requirement for a single source of truth system to manage cost, schedule, contracts, documents, and workflows at scale.

The Solution

To meet these demands, the project team selected PMWEB because it could provide the following:

  • A unified project‐controls platform capable of integrating cost, schedule, change management, documents, and collaboration across international teams.
  • Multilingual support (English/Arabic) and configuration flexibility to adapt to local/regional workflows.
  • Real-time dashboards and executive visibility to manage large-scale capital flows, high-stakes risk, and high governance demands.
  • Proven track record in large, complex infrastructure and capital program delivery.

By standardising on PMWEB, the GEM program eliminated fragmented tools, reduced duplication of data, improved data transparency, and gave decision-makers a single “control centre” for managing this extraordinary asset.

Partner Spotlight: Hill International

As the program management consultant for GEM and a long-standing PMWEB enterprise client, Hill International led digital project controls strategy and deployment.

Hill standardized PMWEB across the program, migrated data from prior systems, aligned global stakeholders, and established best-practice governance frameworks, later rolling PMWEB out across hundreds of projects worldwide.

This partnership reflects the shared mission between Hill and PMWEB: elevating program controls for the world’s most complex capital programs.

The Results

The deployment of PMWEB contributed materially to the success of the museum by unifying digital program control under a centralized environment supporting:

  • Reliable cost tracking and program governance
  • Consistency across global workflows and approvals
  • Faster decision-making through transparent dashboards
  • Centralized data for auditability and executive oversight
  • Successful coordination across more than seven nations
  • A scalable model replicated by Hill across future programs

The Grand Egyptian Museum stands today not only as a monument to history but as a testament to the power of modern digital delivery.

Strategic Significance 

Beyond the project controls performance, the GEM project represents a broader strategic story:

  • For Egypt, this museum is a cornerstone of its tourism strategy, expected to attract millions of visitors annually and to position Egypt as a global cultural hub.
  • For the construction and capital-programme world, GEM signals how modern heritage infrastructure projects require advanced digital platforms to keep pace with scale, complexity,  and international scrutiny.
  • The combination of ancient artefact display and modern digital project delivery embodies a new kind of infrastructure story: one where heritage meets high-tech management, and where culture meets control systems.

Looking Ahead

With the museum now open, the ongoing role of PMWEB transitions to operational support: monitoring visitor-facilities projects, ongoing maintenance programs, future expansion, and additional galleries or outreach initiatives. PMWEB remains the backbone of the programme’s lifecycle control, from capital delivery through to operations.