Lots of progress in the last couple of weeks! I met with Phil at the glass show. He was kind enough to offer to send out one of his technicians to help us finish our implementation. So I went back to the group and had them generate a list of all items we need from SoftTech. This includes bugs, minor annoyances, and enhancements. There are only 11 items on our list. This week SoftTech killed 5 of them. By this time next week we may be down to just the enhancements.I pulled the whole group together and we went back through our workflow. With the input from the group, we have been able to document most of our process and simplify it down to some pretty basic steps. We have since implemented this on two projects and they are having significant gains in productivity. The last workflow issue to resolve is with BIM projects. The BIM models are required early in the process (around the time the shop drawings are being submitted for the first time). On a custom system project, it requires that you import all of the extrusions and create all of the assemblies before you can build the elevations and then export the model. The difficulty is with the milling ops. It is not easy to anticipate all of the required milling ops if you are working from the estimating takeoff or architectural drawings. If you wait to add the milling ops, then you may have to go back to all of your elevations and substitute the assemblies to get them to show up. We’re still working on how to address this.
October 2, 2010
