Manu Venugopal, senior product manager, BIM 360 Construction IQ, Autodesk, spoke with AECCafe Voice about BAM Ireland and its data management challenges prior to adopting Autodesk BIM 360 and Construction IQ. Royal BAM is one of Europe’s most successful engineering and construction companies, with over 21,000 employees and thousands of projects ongoing each year. The sheer volume of papers and files the organization handles is astronomical and has been difficult to assemble in a useful and comprehensive way. By digitizing their workflows they were were able to achieve a 20% reduction in on-site quality and safety issues, and 25% more time to focus on high-risk items.
Simeon Balabanov, Chaos Group V-Ray for Unreal's Product Manager, spoke about the product’s newly released capabilities to what is said to be the only production rendering workflow designed for real-time.
Mark Gargarian, Marketing Department for ARCHIBUS, Inc. spoke to AECCafe Voice this week about the company’s latest release. ARCHIBUS Inc., the industry’s leading Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS), announced a groundbreaking update to its suite of solutions for the management of real estate, infrastructure, facilities and the workplace. The new version, V.24.1 includes the ARCHIBUS Workplace, a new product entirely, that connects staff to their work spaces from any device.
2018 brought with it the realization and development of various technologies that will serve to move the AEC industry forward and in some cases, serve the concept of digital cities more widely. Digital Twin technology has emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the coming years.
Autodesk University 2018 in November in Las Vegas, opened with its usual youthful cool vigor, dancing and mix music for the opening session. CEO of Autodesk, Andrew Anagnost, presented opening remarks, outlining the company vision of automation.
Responsibilities of the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority are vast, as they manage stewardship of federal port lands in and around Vancouver, British Columbia.
The port authority oversees and manages over 16,000 hectares of water, more than 1,000 hectares of land, and approximately 350 kilometers of shoreline, bordering 16 municipalities and intersecting the asserted and established territories and treaty lands of several Coast Salish First Nations.
The port authority’s mandate includes handling permits for all projects for proposed federal port lands use and is responsible for real estate management. It also manages infrastructure development designed to support growth and efficient operations.
In order to manage all this, the port authority maintains a repository of AutoCAD drawings. They have been AutoCAD Map 3D and Civil 3D users for a long time.
Maintaining source drawings from many systems such as water, communication, electrical, storm, sewer, and more is what the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s Spatial Data Group does on a daily basis. Team members create plans based in these systems and want to query features from each of them. One of the primary problems was that those features could be unintentionally removed from the source drawing if the user didn’t detach it before saving the working file. It could then be gone forever. The team really wanted a solution that could automatically create an audit trail displaying everyone who had modified a file.
Joe Hedrick, manager, Infrastructure Solutions for IMAGINiT, answered some questions for AECCafe Voice on how the port authority found a solution for tracking and safeguarding its CAD drawings in the form of Autodesk Vault.
The process of creating useful 3D mesh models from point clouds and as-built images is one that can be challenging for software but is in high demand in the AEC industry. Pointfuse is a construction software solution that creates intelligent, manageable 3D mesh models with separable objects based on as-built images and point clouds. Customers around the world use it to help in clash detection, scheduling, verification, and other construction processes that benefit from reality capture.
Searching, finding, collaboration and versioning of documents is a constant challenge for AEC organizations. How to organize and visualize documents and data has resulted in the development of some interesting engineering document management solutions. The following three document management solutions take a different approach to managing, visualizing and collaborating with AEC documents and data that further users’ ability to organize projects digitally.
Bluebeam, Inc., of Pasadena, California, part of the Nemetschek Group, announced recently that it has substantially acquired all of the assets of privately held Project Atlas, LLC.
Construction industry veterans Todd Wynne and Joe Williams founded Project Atlas in 2017. They created a digital mapping engine that uses geo-location instead of traditional folder structures to organize and visualize 2D plans and construction data. According to company materials, this location-based orientation allows design and construction professionals to create and search a seamless digital map of their project that contains plans, people, material, site photos and drone imagery, all within highly detailed, zoomable layers.
“Bluebeam was founded on the idea that powerful AEC solutions should also be easy to use, capable of delivering the right information at the right time while improving the ability of all project partners to collaborate throughout the lifecycle of an entire project,” says Bluebeam CEO Jon Elliott. “We are incredibly excited to add Project Atlas to our portfolio of solutions to continue delivering on this promise. Project Atlas provides users an entirely new way to visually organize and unify location-based documents and data. This location-based methodology dramatically reduces the time it takes to find critical plans and information, empowering owners, architects, engineers, contractors and specialty contractors to access data in an immediately understandable way that will be especially beneficial in the field.”
Bluebeam looks forward to demonstrating workflows incorporating Project Atlas at the Bluebeam Extreme Conference, taking place 17–19 September in Austin, Texas (USA).
Bluebeam’s markup and collaboration solutions are intuitive to those in the AEC industry who manage and collaborate on projects digitally.
eQuorum’s ImageSite Engineering CAD Drawing Markup Software is a product that provides markup capabilities in real time, so that multiple users can collaborate on drawing files and documents at the same time along with workflows. Videos and photos can be included. Drawings can be redlined and used in the office, field or production site. (more…)
Robert Berry IMSI Design, spoke with AECCafe Voice about the newly released TurboCAD 2018 line of products, including Pro Platinum, Expert, Deluxe and Designer versions for Windows® desktop PCs.
