Archives for July 2010

We have our last round of training for Fremont this week. After this week, all of the engineering group in Fremont will have completed the V6 training. We are putting V6 through its paces right now. The LAX project (concourse and core) will be an excellent test of how well V6 will work for us. Complex geometry, BIM requirements, extremely fast schedule and totally custom system. So far so good! We are finishing the mock-up this week and have created wireframe geometry for the North Concourse.
We are also finishing the material takeoffs and starting fabrication tickets for the Samaritan office building in San Jose. Nice unitized wall system project. In fact, all new projects will go through V6. We are very close to finishing our implementation. Just a few things to finish on details (probably next week).

Spent this week training 4 more people on V6. The 27 or so training videos we have put together have made the training process much better and more professional. It also documents our process really well as well as providing an easy way to go back and review specific items if you can’t remember something.
So we are very close to completing our implementation. Really just a few items left to go. We need to complete dialing in our data access from other branches, finish our detail implementation for shop drawings and a couple of open items on packaging and pricing for miscellaneous items.
We are now using V6 on all upcoming projects. The Samaritan project, LAX, Neuroscience, Equinix and Kaiser Redwood City are our first projects for V6. Should have some results to post in the next month or so…

So the remote desktop software works great for V6. I can’t say the same for Autocad. You can’t run Autocad from a server so you can’t use the remote desktop software for it. Since most of our implementation involves automating Autocad with the data from V6, that is causing a problem.
We have a custom Microsoft Access program that uses the data from V6 to drive most of our downstream processes. Reporting, extrusion optimizations, Autocad Cleanup, fabrication drawings, etc… The program works fine in the Fremont office where we also have the SQL server, but the latency in the other offices when working over the network was a real issue. We spent the week testing different data access methods and found some interesting things. If you try to copy data from SQL over the network to a linked table, the performance is horrible. If you copy the same data to an unlinked table, it is much better. The best performance came from using stored procedures or pass-through queries to fill a non-linked tab …