Good morning,
My company is making the move from doing everything in Revit, to working in 3D with preferred suppliers. This is a business case I would like some input for but I would also like to discuss some of the best ways to achieve this in an open fashion.
Let me outline what we're doing. Our primary business is to build homes from a conceptual viewpoint, mainly floor plan repetition throughout a project from prefabricated components. i.e. it is quite common to have a project of 60-100 houses with only three or four different floor plans. The variation comes from options buyers get to choose from (extensions, open or closed kitchen, and when possible a garage or carport, etc.). The construction time of each house is about 12 weeks, and for big projects we are able to start construction on the next house the next day. The main structure is wind- and watertight in two weeks after construction starts.
As a side note, we achieve repetition and manage changes by working with groups.
From our Revit models we extract permit, sales, system floors, prefabricated walls and contract drawings. The focus for our construction drawings rests on system floors and prefabricated walls. Those are now extracted 2D with no annotations. The plant will then load them into their software and do their work. So one could imagine our models contain a lot of information and 3D detailing which is a time hog for the design process and change management. Maybe this is the way to go. And maybe not.
Basically one of the suggestions is to dumb the model down all the way back to 'basic Revit intelligence', and after permit and sales drawings break it into separate pieces for our manufacturers to do their work. After all, they know their detailing better than we do.
My biggest concern is that this is very much like working in one direction. We create, we export, they make. But we would also like to co-ordinate what they make, especially if we are going to dumben our models down.
One of the way to do this is Navisworks. But I have also heard of a variation loosely based on worksets, which is to send the model to our manufacturers, then let them do their work, after which we link that into a Revit file. This is used as a sort of 'Navisworks light' to detect clashes and co-ordinate the process. The linked file is synced with an internet location to which our manufacturers have access so whenever they upload a new file, it gets synced with our server and loaded into the project.
I am sure there are more (and probably more suitable) ways, and that each of the methods mentioned above have their cons and pros. And I would like to investigate as many of them as possible. If you have any experience please feel welcome to share, or if you have your own suggestions you want to put to the test then that would also be appreciated.
Please note, we are a small scale operation. We have 5 Revit modellers who also co-ordinate the construction process and use the models to make their decisions. We build about 300 houses each year. So our software budget is fairly limited and so are the resources (manpower) to exercise pilot projects. In my opinion BIM should not become a goal on it's own but a solution to support existing processes, and the best way to do this is to use existing tools in a more sensible fashion.
My company is making the move from doing everything in Revit, to working in 3D with preferred suppliers. This is a business case I would like some input for but I would also like to discuss some of the best ways to achieve this in an open fashion.
Let me outline what we're doing. Our primary business is to build homes from a conceptual viewpoint, mainly floor plan repetition throughout a project from prefabricated components. i.e. it is quite common to have a project of 60-100 houses with only three or four different floor plans. The variation comes from options buyers get to choose from (extensions, open or closed kitchen, and when possible a garage or carport, etc.). The construction time of each house is about 12 weeks, and for big projects we are able to start construction on the next house the next day. The main structure is wind- and watertight in two weeks after construction starts.
As a side note, we achieve repetition and manage changes by working with groups.
From our Revit models we extract permit, sales, system floors, prefabricated walls and contract drawings. The focus for our construction drawings rests on system floors and prefabricated walls. Those are now extracted 2D with no annotations. The plant will then load them into their software and do their work. So one could imagine our models contain a lot of information and 3D detailing which is a time hog for the design process and change management. Maybe this is the way to go. And maybe not.
Basically one of the suggestions is to dumb the model down all the way back to 'basic Revit intelligence', and after permit and sales drawings break it into separate pieces for our manufacturers to do their work. After all, they know their detailing better than we do.
My biggest concern is that this is very much like working in one direction. We create, we export, they make. But we would also like to co-ordinate what they make, especially if we are going to dumben our models down.
One of the way to do this is Navisworks. But I have also heard of a variation loosely based on worksets, which is to send the model to our manufacturers, then let them do their work, after which we link that into a Revit file. This is used as a sort of 'Navisworks light' to detect clashes and co-ordinate the process. The linked file is synced with an internet location to which our manufacturers have access so whenever they upload a new file, it gets synced with our server and loaded into the project.
I am sure there are more (and probably more suitable) ways, and that each of the methods mentioned above have their cons and pros. And I would like to investigate as many of them as possible. If you have any experience please feel welcome to share, or if you have your own suggestions you want to put to the test then that would also be appreciated.
Please note, we are a small scale operation. We have 5 Revit modellers who also co-ordinate the construction process and use the models to make their decisions. We build about 300 houses each year. So our software budget is fairly limited and so are the resources (manpower) to exercise pilot projects. In my opinion BIM should not become a goal on it's own but a solution to support existing processes, and the best way to do this is to use existing tools in a more sensible fashion.
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