As capital projects become more complex, visibility into these projects remains largely obscured for the industry, costing construction companies and project owners in wasted time, money and resources. Traditionally speaking, a substantial portion of the problem centers around the lack of appropriate models. Models provide insights and a transparency that simply cannot be otherwise experienced until construction is done – and then it’s too late.
So, how can you clear up these problems and start gaining crucial visibility into your projects for all stakeholders from day one? With today’s best modeling technology connected to other project control applications.
How the Design Process Creates Working Models
We know the process starts in design, but let’s explore this for a moment. How does everything really come together? In many industries after the project has been awarded, the design teams will sit down and plan out design areas and deliverables to develop a design schedule, i.e., what is going to get issued to construction when.
And then in other industries, the contractor will come alongside the designer and share their schedule for the construction of executing exactly what work will be done in specific areas of the site, and when. Then some massaging takes place between the two schedules providing target dates of specific design deliverables to be delivered to construction.
At this point, there have already been quantities established from the bid and these quantities should be kept at the forefront as design happens, but are they? Do you really have clear understanding of the design progress and quantities?
InEight Design brings project controls to your design team, which provides exactly these insights to exactly where the design is at any given moment and when the design deliverables will be issued.
InEight Design also provides the construction team real-time visibility into evolving construction quantities as design progresses.
Models Utilized Within Construction Projects
In today’s world, all drawings are generated from CAD and depending on the industry, a large part of the CAD files are 3D models.
Today’s 3D models are being used for pre-construction activities like; design coordination (clash detection and design issue tracking), contractors and owners to review the 3D model before drawings are issued to the project, tracking designed quantities to understand if you are on target or is the budget impacted, and model-based takeoff (utilizing model quantities to supplement estimating quantities)
Such 3D models are also used for tracking construction progress of self-performed work and/or sub-contractor’s work and communicating that through visual reporting to keep all project stakeholders informed. They are also being used for workface planning and work packaging. Breaking your work up visually like this provides insights that are generally missed and that can creates extra costs from extra efforts needed during construction.
Models from the Office to the Field
It’s safe to say that it’s a no-brainer that models must be available on mobile devices. This availability serves to reduce the time it takes to capture issues into RFIs, visually see what is going to be constructed from all disciplines in specific work areas, to reference needed documents, and to claim activity statuses.
Project engineers or field engineers can identify project activities that are completed to have that visual within the model, which is available to all project personnel to access up-to-the-minute modeled construction status. The document manager can also play a vital part by connecting construction documents, vendor documents, and more to the model objects as part of their responsibility to allow all project personnel quick access to the documents via the model.
A couple of key takeaways from all of this? First, models are the design, so quantities can be utilized from the model to keep the design quantities up to date. Second, not only does the 3D model provide metadata to be used in project controls throughout the project, but it provides uncontested insight and a new transparency to the project.
Ready to take a deeper dive? InEight can help get your projects where they need to go and help you create a solution that matches your needs while leveraging your teams’ existing strengths. Let us show you how.
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