Met with Geoff and Mike from SoftTech. We were out doing some BIM training at our Las Vegas and Los Angeles offices. Geoff and Mike met up with us in Las Vegas. Geoff showed us a hidden feature where you can create sub-quotes. This is a feature we had asked for and they were looking into the idea. You create a main quote and then, if this command line option is set, you can create sub-quotes that contain different quote items from the main quote. Changes made in the main quote will update the sub-quote and changes in the sub-quote will change the main quote. It works perfect for stick walls! It still needs a bit of work for unitized walls though. This allows you to have more than one person working on a single project. It also allows you to work in smaller quotes so that saves go much faster on large jobs. If we can get the nested frames to work in the same way, this will be a huge feature.

We had a very productive week this week. We announced the merger of our drafting and takeoff teams. This will allow us to have all engineering under one roof. I think this will really help us in our implementation of V6. Since the process of shop drawings, material takeoffs and fabrication tickets will soon emanate from one central software, it makes sense to keep all those activities in the same team.We also finished our proof of concept on using V6 for shop drawings. The outputs from V6 are less than stellar. SoftTech has been working on this for some time and they are anticipating that in version 3.5 it will be greatly enhanced. In the mean time, we began exploring using the V6 output along with some custom clean-up routines and the Sheet Set functionality in Autocad to create our shop drawings. This seems to be working very well. It will still require a bit of manual clean-up but should reduce the time required to produce the elevations and details as well as ensure the shop drawings are in sync with the data.

V6 can create excellent VRML models of your windows or curtainwalls. These can then be imported into Navisworks to create a seamless BIM integration for your projects. We are starting to look at creating an VRML to IFC converter. It would be great to convert the VRML files to IFC files so you could import them into Revit or Tekla. Our precast division is using Tekla right now and they would like to import our V6 data and be able to cut a section and get their details. Anyone ever tried this before?

Just a quick update on our project. We are very near completion on the V6 implementation. We are running our second project through the program. We have created a wish list and SoftTech is working through the items we have asked for. We had an issue with our template frames taking a long time to save, but it appears they have a fix and we should have it in the next couple of weeks.I’m really happy with our progress and I hope to be complete with our testing phase by the end of the year. We created two estimates and the associated 3d models from the program and that worked out great. The real opportunity is to be able to create the jobs at the sales/estimating stage then just tweak it around at the operations stage.We have a meeting in December to review how this new paradigm might change our structure. We plan on using the V6 software for estimating, shop drawings, takeoffs, fabrication tickets and CNC output. Most of these modules are in place now. The question becomes, do we change the departments when we implement the software? Right now we have one group doing shop drawings and another group doing the takeoffs and fabrication tickets. Would it make sense with the new software to combine the groups so one person does all of that on a single project? Do we train the sales team to use V6 or put engineering people in sales to do the V6 work?

I’ll post more as we move forward.

I flew back to Miami to meet with SoftTech and discuss the implementation of some of our unitized curtain wall suggestions into the software. The main thing, is to enable V6 to contribute to the BIM process. We have several projects that are using the new “integrated project delivery” process where we need to export a model of our curtain wall back to the contractor for use in a coordinated model using Navisworks. V6 can already do this! We can model the building in the program then export a 3d representation of our model out to an Autocad drawing file. SoftTech is working on a wireframe import function that will allow us to import more complex geometry either from Autocad or from Revit to start our models. This will allow for more complex geometry that is hard to model now.More on this in the future.