How I Knew I Needed BIM 360

Real-world construction problems don’t come with owner’s manuals or labels explaining what software tools will help solve them. When you are experiencing a problem with your project workflow, it takes time and effort to research and locate the right solution. And there are a LOT of solutions out there that purport to be perfect for your situation. How can you know what to invest in? Following is an example of a problem that you may have experienced in your own job.

Issues

During my previous life as BIM Manager and Quality Control Engineer on a hospital project, I was put in charge of quality control after our quality control manager took another job. At the time, we were struggling with the project. Although it was early in construction, we had over 300 open issues that were slowing us down.

The list of issues was awful. It was logged and maintained in Excel and was about ten pages long. Because there was so much information, the list was small, disorganized and hard to read. To make things worse, we had to match the Excel list to pictures taken in the field and a map of where all the issues were located. To put it nicely, it was a disaster to look at and deal with.

Because of dealing with this awful list, our meetings and resolutions to the problems were slow and messy. The issues weren’t clearly documented or located, so our subs were confused about what the problems were, where they were located, or even whether or not they had already been taken care of. We spent as much time in the meetings ripping the awful report was as we did discussing how to solve the problems. In addition, if someone came to me asking to get their own custom list and map of the issues, it took me an hour or more to create it. The whole process was a disaster.

Help

I finally decided something had to be done, and that’s when I asked for help. I needed something that organized our issues clearly and concisely, where I could easily create reports and track the status of all issues. My BIM manager introduced me to Autodesk BIM 360.

Within the first month, things improved unbelievably. My team was no longer complaining about the way data was organized and presented, so my meetings were shorter and better. When I started this process, we had over 300 open quality issues, but by month’s end I had cut that in half. The next month, we went from 150 open issues to 100. The third month, I don’t know how we did. I took my job with Applied Software and started teaching people around the country how to use BIM 360!

With BIM 360, resolving issues can be as streamlined as hyperlinking to the model and adding notes about what needs to be done and by whom. Check out this recap article about the recent AEC Disruptors Podcast, “Using BIM 360 as a Single Source of Truth.”

All of the BIM 360 products are used for collaboration on construction projects using the building information modeling (BIM) process. By collaborating, teams work together to resolve issues and deliver successful projects on time and within budget. 

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Need a partner to help you manage your project’s issues? Contact Applied Software today for a discovery call with an industry-trained expert to explore a streamlined process using the BIM 360 tool that best suits your company. Applied experts are transforming the construction industry by championing innovation.