CAD-1 Blog
In this final article we will talk about implementation and transition planning. Your key BIM “Checklist for Success” must include the following:
- Get assistance developing a sound implementation strategy. There are a wide variety of information sources to help you. Talk with firms that are at various stages of adoption, read AIA documents, go through the McGraw-Hill BIM report, talk with your allied professional network, and talk with CAD-1. Then decide what is right for your firm’s personality.
- Understand that BIM is a business decision, not just a new drawing tool. Successful BIM based firms rethink everything from workflow to billing practices, from client marketing to staffing, services offered and more. Make sure you develop a broad vision as your firm makes the transition.
- Assemble your “A-list” team. These are the people that will absorb the new technologies, help you rethink the processes, mentor the rest of the staff and provide the “glue” that keeps transition on track and vital.
- Select a suitable starting project. Your first project or two should be “familiar” projects that allow you a great deal of freedom to think about, explore and master the new technology and workflow. Projects with an extremely tight time table and projects that are highly design intensive should be reserved for a point where the team feels comfortable with the technological fundamentals.
- Evaluate and improve after each step and project. Meet regularly to evaluate what is going well, what needs to be improved and how to incorporate the necessary changes into your workflow. Tie this in with outside mentoring assistance for a couple projects, and you will see much faster gains in productivity. Of all of the “Checklist for Success” steps, this is the most often neglected and perhaps the most essential for ongoing success.
Building Information Modeling is one of the most important shifts ever in the design field. It allows for exciting new possibilities in design, essential movement towards a more sustainable world and many new business opportunities. Change managed well has the power to bring additional energy to your practice.
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Posted 10/23/2009 by Jarod Schultz |
Category:
Building
Engineers face a daunting task when undertaking a road reconstruction project. Reconstruction is considered a difficult type of road design to carry out. Rather than dealing with pristine geometry conditions of new construction, irregular existing conditions, and their challenges, are inherent in reconstruction. Accurate design, an accurate account of material types and quantities, along with attention to environmental impacts are all critical to the design process.
AutoCAD Civil and AutoCAD Civil 3D software (referred to here as “the Civil products”) come equipped with specific subassemblies meant for road rehabilitation and reconstruction. This results in the ability to configure those subassemblies to make design decisions more automatic—thus, realizing time and cost savings.
For example, The City of Loveland announced an intersection reconstruction project that will begin soon. The City decided to use a unique, patented, left-turn intersection design. This design is known as a Continuous Flow Intersection (CFI). There are less than a dozen of these unique intersections in the country. To name a few project locations, the CFI was implemented in Colorado Springs, Salt Lake City, and St. Louis. Due to the increased traffic growth in a particular intersection, the CFI will allow left-turners to simultaneously flow with forward-moving traffic and right-turning traffic. This design allows for less wait time at red arrows and safely provides an alternative to the traditional left turn signals. It all adds up to greater traffic flow, less wait time, lessened business impact, and lower project cost. You can view the CFI video here
http://tinyurl.com/y8hm6km.
With just the out-of-the-box subassembly tools, The Civil products can productively, efficiently, and timely handle these types of reconstruction projects. The integrated tools will help stretch dollars further, enable methods to help optimize designs, and provide powerful Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology. The Civil products have come a long way since its baby-step inception, but each release realizes a more robust and powerful design and collaboration tool. You can view an on-demand webcast “The Road Ahead” interactive video at
www.autodesk.com/roadahead.
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Posted 10/7/2009 by Brian Hailey |
Category:
Civil
The project is testing remote delivery of Autodesk applications over the Internet. The goal of project Twitch is to enable you to test and try the latest versions of AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, and Maya without having to install or download the applications. These applications run remotely on our servers and are delivered to you over the Internet. You will use them in the same way that you would if they were on installed on your system.
Autodesk Labs Link
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Posted 10/7/2009 by Jarod Schultz |