If technology’s worth comes from what you do with it, a new system leveraging digital pens and common printers to mate marks on paper with their authoring files may be valuable indeed. Slide Show ‘Plots’ contain a wealth of routing data. The tech bits are not new, but the workflow developed around them is. Bentley Systems Inc., Exton, Pa., announced ProjectWise Dynamic Plot V8i on May 27. When users of the ProjectWise content management and collaboration system use the dynamic plot option to print, a background pattern is produced on the paper. It is like a microscopic bar code on
A shiver went through the contractor world in mid-May after the product manager for Autodesk’s Constructware, a heavily used, hosted construction-project management tool, was quoted in an interview saying new feature development was being halted in a cost-cutting move, although the product would be maintained and supported. The statement, at first confirmed by Timothy Douglas, the company’s construction solutions manager—then reversed by Jay Bhatt, senior vice president of Autodesk’s AEC Industry Group—set off alarms across the industry. Some contractors and owners for whom Constructware is mission-critical for running big, multiyear projects, interpreted the comments as an indication San Raphael-based Autodesk’s
No one has misplaced Guantanamo Bay, but the half-century-old U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba has made the Communist-ruled island nation “terra incognita” on the world’s telecommunications map. The White House’s new policy of opening the door to travel and telecommunications links with Cuba could soon sketch in the country. Branching units on cables will permit connection to Cuba. “I think there’s a tremendous potential opportunity there,” says Tom Soja, Boston-based vice president of Ocean Specialists Inc., an engineer and contractor for subsea cables. Fiber-optic cables snake all around and through the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. But
Attention building-information-modeling rookies: Experiences of BIM veterans in the following pages of ENR may save you from reinventing many spokes on the still-rickety wheels of the wagon rolling toward glitch-free use of high-tech tools to make building design and construction less bumpy. The first piece of advice to first-time travelers down the BIM road is to get BIM’s equivalent of driving lessons and roadside assistance. Warning: If you go it alone, you may get into serious trouble. Even modeling veterans can benefit from a BIM “global positioning system.” The helpers call themselves BIM managers or model integrators. The name doesn’t
The year was 2005. The project was the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Jackson, Miss. The decision, made by the U.S. General Services Administration at the end of design development, was to turn the 400,000-sq-ft facility into a GSA poster child for building information modeling. The design team would create a coordinated BIM and use it to produce 2D contract documents. The team would also provide its BIMs to the construction manager-general contractor, as reference material only, for use during construction. Photo: Dana Eldridge, Jacobs Image: Ghafari Associates Designers produced 2D drawings from coordinated model. Related Links: Digging into 3D Modeling
The main lesson learned by the construction manager who recently completed a pioneering four-year, BIM-enabled project to build a replacement ballpark for the New York Yankees is “the more trades modeling, the merrier,” says James Barrett, manager of virtual design and construction for Turner Construction Co., the CM at-risk. But more doesn’t necessarily mean more complex, in terms of interoperabilty, anyway. Building on the experiences with the Yankees project, Barrett says Turner is satisfied for now to see subcontractors building their own models and working with their tools of choice, at their preferred levels of detail beyond a minimum standard,
Sutter Health’s Digby Christian is dead serious about delivering the $320-million replacement for Sutter Medical Center Castro Valley on time and on budget in 2013. But he also is not kidding, and sees no contradiction, when he refers to the 223,500-sq-ft job as a living laboratory. In its most ambitious experiment yet, Sutter is going beyond building information modeling’s low hanging fruit—clash detection—and exploring BIM-based estimating, automated code checking and direct digital-model exchange for detailing, coordination, automated fabrication and scheduling. The nonprofit hospital owner wants to prove it is possible to reduce waste and risk while delivering a better facility,
One lesson learned from the Walsh Group’s construction- management assignment on a 650,000-sq-ft hospital in Elgin, Ill.—a project Walsh took over as mass excavation and steel procurement were under way—is that a lack of team experience with building information modeling should not be an inhibiting factor on a complex construction project. image: Walsh Construction Photo: Walsh Construction In some areas ducts hung below plumbing because pipe lead times were less. Related Links: Digging into 3D Modeling Unearths Many Worms Leading-Edge Collaboration Hurt By Lots of Software Workarounds 3D Modeling Spurs Architect To Reorganize Divisions of Labor Leading Off With a
At a time when companies struggle to reduce “optional” expenses like conferences and travel, one organization of determined visionaries still attracts strong participation as it drives efforts to bring efficiency-enhancing technologies to the workplace. FIATECH, an industry consortium heavy in the capital facilities sector but drawing increasing interest from other areas of construction, fielded a strong turnout of technology leaders at its annual conference in Las Vegas on April 6-9. Attendance was down about 17% from previous records, but those who came despite the recession said now is the time to integrate improvements to position their companies for the next
Building information modeling has come a long way recently, but it is still far from being business as usual. That, and lack of BIM software interoperability, were about the only two subjects of general agreement regarding BIM among the 60 attendees of a recent “eConstruction” roundtable, in Phoenix. As recently as two years ago, there were no model BIM contracts and most designers did not have staff trained on BIM, said John Cross, a vice president of the American Institute of Steel Construction, Chicago, which cohosted the March 31 session with the American College of Construction Lawyers. Work-flow efficiency is
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