Getting Your Fab Documents from Revit

RALPH SCHOCH: Hello, I'm Ralph Schoch. And today, we'll be talking about getting your fab documents from Revit.

I'm Ralph Schoch. I'm from Victaulic company. As I go through here today, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some of the journey that we've had in our own group, but also some of the challenges we've had getting fabrication documents out of Revit, and some tips and tricks to help your company as well.

I work for Victaulic. We're a pipe-fitting manufacturer. I'm the software, technology, internal support manager there. And Victaulic is actually a pretty old company. We're over 100 years old now. We have foundries all over the world. We manufacture pipe fittings and accessories, valves.

And a big part of what we do is BIM. And we have a 120-plus team-- 125-plus team all over the world. We do estimation right out to full fabrication, spool drawings, details, help manage and track site installation inspections. So we go right from design right out to construction with all our customers.

Some of the projects that we work on, some of the spools and things that we create and we help our customers fabricate in your shop-- a lot of times they look like this, but not always. Sometimes-- this is some smaller six-inch pipe. But we get into pipe that's over 100 and some inches where you can walk down through the system. And we're modeling those all in Revit as well, utilizing the software, building custom families and workflows to get out the different fabrication spools and get it out through the shop.

A big thing for us is logistics and shipping-to-site. This is what would be one of the examples of how we palletize the spools and get those organized so that they're easy to unload and get them coordinated and staged so they go into the site efficiently and make it easy for the field crew to install. So there's a lot of things that have to go on to try to pull this stuff together. And we're going to talk a little bit today about how we can get that out of Revit.

Some of the tech stack that we use, some of the software-- I always find this interesting-- obviously Autodesk software products all over the board, whether it's Build, BIM Collaborate, Revit, you know, Navisworks still, ReCap, do a lot of scanning. We built our own softwares to bridge some gaps and then also a lot of development-type tools.

We actually built and developed web-based tools for our internal team. So that way, we can pull bills of material and manage material on jobs. So we have a pretty big team with our own development and a lot of that, those tools that we develop internally, then we can give out to our customers to use as well.

Software pieces that I manage is our Victaulic Tools for Revit. I'm not going to talk a lot about that today. It's going to be primarily around workflows, around fabrication workflows and getting spool drawings and things out of Revit. But I will probably jump into a couple different tools just because it facilitates-- it demonstrates various points a little easier.

And really, if you're going to be creating spool drawings out of Revit, you're going to purchase some type of add-in, whether it's ours or some other company's. A lot of the add-ins are going to work very similar. They're going to use a lot of the same technology or Revit assemblies, a lot of the same workflows because they're going to all hit a lot of the same challenges.

We do actually have a lot of customers-- we have people out there and customers that have built their own spooling tools and ways of creating Revit assemblies and managing the data and things. So hopefully, if you're one of those people, today's class should be pretty interesting. Maybe there'll be some additional things that you've learned-- or that you'll learn through the course of the next hour or so.

We also built a web app. So a big thing for us is QA/QC quality control. We built an application that the site can use to track the installation. And if there's issues, which is, it's a neat little app. It's actually free, and we'll talk a little bit about that later. So anybody can have that for free.

So today we're going to talk a little about how to reduce overhead with Revit assemblies, talk a little bit about DfMA, and talk about some of the challenges and some of the tips and tricks and workarounds to get fabrication information out, especially for some fabrication parts, and some of the ITM components where that data isn't easily accessible.

So in general, our topics, I'm going to break it down into five different sections. So today we have our general Revit project management. Then we're going to go into managing assemblies, adding DfMA to your families, showing some tricks around that and how we standardize what we design or what we lay out, and fab tips and tricks on hangers and skids, and talking a little bit more about that QC side, Quality Control, on how to make sure everything goes out to the site or goes out to the site accurately, but also to the fab shop, make sure that data that the BIM team executes to the shop is correct and accurate.

General project management-- these are a little bit of the tips and tricks that I've accumulated over the years or things I keep in mind on a higher level when working on Revit projects. A lot of times-- I know 800 meg is probably low in today's standard. We try to keep our models down around that if we can. As soon as a model gets up over a gig, then you're going to start feeling that. And that's going to really impede efficiency on the project.

So one of the things you do have to be aware too is, when you're looking at your file size in Autodesk Construction Cloud, ACC, the file size also includes the links. So, you're going to be well over that 800 meg with that number because that number includes the links. I'm just talking about the singular model that you're working out of. So just be aware that those two numbers are a little different.

We have some hard, fast rules that have proven to keep us out of binds many times. One thing is, if we have a different building, we have a different model. And we deal with all size projects. Sometimes you have a smaller project. Sometimes you have a larger project. The thing about it is that you never know where those buildings are going to be on site.

The design model might show the buildings 100 feet apart. It turns out they're 110 apart. So if it's all one model, that means you'd have to move your piping to try to reconnect into the civil connection points. So we definitely-- we have a hard and fast rule, even if it's a simple pump house or something, small building off on the side. We do create a separate model for that just because it simplifies project organization.

On the civil and underground piping, also we're going to have a hard, fast rule internally with our group that that's going to be a different model and that'll keep us out of trouble there. I'm not necessarily talking about underground or under slab piping. That's all part of the building. And that all stays in the singular model that we try to stay by.

So when we do split models, first, we don't go by floor. I know traditionally AutoCAD workflows, a lot of times people would split by floor. We will do that if we have to. But we try to save that really as the last resort. Primarily, trade is a great way to split duct versus piping. That's obviously a very logical area. Mechanical piping versus plumbing or fire protection, those all could be separated really easily, your heating and cooling lines versus your slope piping. Keeping those separate models can save a lot of size.

When we start putting a lot of this assemblies and views and sheets from those assemblies inside our Revit models, it definitely starts to make them a lot larger. So the smaller amounts of piping or ductwork that you're going to have in that model, really the better. It's going to make everybody's work go a lot faster.

We'll split it up by area as well. I'll also say area but also by piping system. So one of the things now with even fab parts and Revit families, you can calculate fixture units or GPM. Now, if you want to try to do that, you're going to need the entire piping system in one model.

So that's another way to look at it, that you may want to consider not splitting by floor or area, but split up by different systems. And then that can help, especially when you get into distribution, if you can try to keep a lot of those rack systems all in one model, that's going to be very important. And that's another thing you got to consider too. If you start splitting your model up and you want to create multi-trade racks, now you're going to have a challenge in trying to bring that data back together.

This is a thing we see. And I've got some images on the right here to illustrate this, as well, around worksets. And we see a lot of companies use worksets for visibility control. If you're in an AutoCAD workflow, a layer management, you can definitely do that in Revit. But traditionally, we never do that. That's something we don't do.

Our workflow and what our best practices are would be to apply parameters and data to the components and filter things based on that because for us, what we use worksets for is primarily for helping us manage large model performance. Big thing is, you can put a large portion of your project in a workset that's maybe complete. And then, you only need to load that when you need that piping.

So you can see over here on the right, I have an image inside ACC Docs. When you're opening your Revit model, there's three dots on the far right. You can actually specify your worksets on which ones you want to have opened. And in this case, I just have shared levels and grids and Workset1. But you can fill out and create any additional worksets for completed work and then tell that not to load those.

And when you're dealing with large models that get up over a gig, that's a way to easily be able to manage that and make that model easier to use. Challenge is, when you don't have worksets to be able to open, that model is going to be a little bit of a challenge. So deleting your worksets is not going to be something you'll be able to do on one of these mega models.

Some other general practices that we follow and we do-- inserted CAD. That's always a challenge. I've had quite a few models where people just insert a piece of CAD somewhere, and that becomes very difficult to find. Links obviously are better for that always.

Sometimes you want to bring in a piece of a CAD geometry. You can-- good way to do that is to bring it into a family and then bring that family inside Revit. I have two meg limit here, but obviously I've done that with larger files. You got to keep them-- keep in mind that as you add more of the CAD geometry or large-scale components, if they're all over the model, that's going to create a bigger problem. You really need to spend the time to create a purpose-built Revit family that's lightweight, that's going to be able to flex and give you that representation that you're trying to achieve with a CAD model.

But if it's a one-off type thing or a reduced amount of times, you're going to see it in your model. It is something that we do. And we actually built tools around to do it based on various things you need to have done or where you want to schedule and build material things.

One of the things we try to do is, you don't always have time to create every family you need for a project. So you need to make sure the processes that you build for your team are going to be easily flexible and you make it that your processes work with many different pieces of content and allow you to bring in content from manufacturers and other sources.

Because at the end of the day, especially on the construction side, we're trying to pull in submittals and data really at the last minute to try to get our fabrication documents out. So it's very important to make sure your systems are flexible and that you have a lot of workarounds to get the documentation out.

Hide objects not needed-- this is a simple thing. But we actually had a large project that we had the insulation on all the piping and ductwork set to transparent, and the model crawled. And if you turned the insulation off, the model was perfectly workable, super fast. So that is something to keep in mind as well. So if you're in views with transparency of a lot of objects, insulation, I know we all like to see it.

But it is something that doubles your geometry count. And it can definitely slow down your model when you have it on. So there's probably views and things like plan views that you could show it. Maybe in the 3D view, you don't, depending on which way you like to work. Obviously, you could do your coordination then out in ACC or Navisworks when possible, which is the next item.

Trying to really reduce the number of loaded links is also, for us, very important. We still do a lot of coordination in Navisworks. We're actually switching over to doing it in ACC, Autodesk Construction Cloud. It makes it a lot easier to coordinate and see your models, but then also reduce the amount of loaded links that we have in our projects. And that really improves response time and modeling and can make things go a lot faster for you there too.

This is another big one that we found too. As you are trying to get fabrication documents out, you're going to rely on a handful of add-ins. And most add-ins will add some amount of project parameters to the project. So you do have to be wary of adding too many project parameters on elements. We are always very careful of that and aware of that. I've seen models dramatically get affected by just having large amounts of parameters on fabrication parts.

And one of the neat things if you're using fabrication parts instead of Revit families in Revit, neat thing there is there's that product information editor, the MAPProd. And you can put a lot of data in there that you normally may manually or automatically push to the components and Revit parameters. So there's quite a few project parameters that are natively available on components in Revit.

Having those automatically populated, as much data, automatically populate from the family or from the fab part or ITM is super important and can help really reduce errors in projects just by having the data more natively drawn opposed to being managed by an add-in.

And also, another thing too is another little hack or trick. If you have an add-in that adds a lot of project parameters and you're not happy with that, and you only use the add-in in minimal ways, you can actually leave those parameters in the project, but just restrict what categories those parameters are applied to. And by doing that, on the right side, you can see here on the top, you can hide all unchecked categories.

That's a quick little thing. I always check that. And then I can see exactly what categories this parameter is being applied to. And if I don't have any use for that parameter, I can just uncheck all those categories. Most of the add-ins will not be able to catch this and be able to change it easily without deleting the parameter and re-adding it. And most times, most add-ins have a code that is set up to not do that because then all your data would get lost as well. So it's a neat little trick that we use to help simplify our models.

Purging unneeded families every few months-- we work on our templates. We actually have a content service that we built. A lot of companies have different content platforms that they host things on. We purged a lot of that content that is in that service out of our Revit templates.

So there's another thing, just keeping your Revit templates light, keeping the files out or keeping excess Revit families out of them if you don't need them. It's that kind of thing, really makes it a lot easier to-- a lot easier to work on the project, makes the project a lot more responsive and keeps your file size small. You don't want to start with a 200 meg file right from your template.

Deleting unused views and assembly views, that's actually a big thing as well. We had a customer one time, they wanted 100 floors and all the sheets and views in their Revit model-- or in their Revit template. And when you do that, it really can slow down-- start slowing down even a project template with almost no data because you start talking about each floor, each dependent view for each area--

You could have a dozen, you could have half a dozen different areas on each floor. So you're talking about hundreds of views that you just created in that template, which is great to have set up, but not great if only need a 20-story building or if you're doing a 20-story building and you only need plan views and all the dependent views for 20 stories. So that's a big thing.

On Revit assemblies-- we'll talk a little bit about that. But when you're detailing those out, a lot of times people create more views than they need. And they leave those old assembly views that aren't on sheets still in the project. So we actually built a little tool around deleting those. That's definitely something you want to consider, making sure you clean that stuff up too.

Just some basic modeling tips and tricks around creating specific views, only looking at what you want using the selection box, that it's amazing how many people still don't know about that tool, the BX command, so using tools like that. For us, every week or actually every couple of weeks-- every two weeks now, we have a collaboration roundtable meeting. And through that, we'd go over a lot of these things internally. And this is a great way to bring on new people, especially new people to Revit.

Every company has-- a lot of times every company has team members that are just starting out. So it's always important to go over some of the basics, even though it seems redundant. But a lot of times, you'll find that your team will benefit from it because they haven't seen everything like everyone else potentially has because their experience is different. So that's always something that's definitely important, I think, is to cover a lot of the things that are important but you may not talk about all the time because it just becomes more common knowledge.

I want to talk a little bit more now about managing assemblies and how we do it and how you can do that in your project and make life a little easier. On the fabrication side, we spend a lot of time managing the data on our projects. A big thing for us is understanding what level all our spools are in, what room they're in, understanding what spool or assembly they're in. Then what we do is we create a lot of these filtered views. So in this way, we can actually see how our project's broken down.

We typically break things down by three different core parameters, project parameters. One's area, second one, zone, and the third one, sequence. Sequence is our big one. And that's what you can see over here on your right. This is basically how the customer decided they wanted the material to come out to site. So we would come in and we'd apply that sequence information across the project. Then you can visually see that. And that then gets driven down into the software as well.

A big thing here for us on the sequence side of things is sequences are tracked by on-site date for us. So we'll break our project down. This is the different dates. And then from those on-site dates, we can figure out when we need the material, when we need to get the drawings to the shop, when the pipe needs to arrive. So it's everything staged. It sets the schedule on the BIM side. And it sets the schedule for the fab shop as well.

So from that, we'll break our projects. We'll take those sequences and we'll add them into packages. We actually have a Package Manager tool as well. We'll take that package. And that package really is tracked by an install group or by a drawing. So you can see over here on your right, you have all those different sequences or all the different colors. And then the drawing is the whole package of everything that's going out for that install. So the different sequences are going to be the different dates. And then the drawing is that segment of work when it's completed.

On the side of spool management, big thing for us is it's important that the parameters for area, level, sequence, and zone are applied down to the pieces and parts. That data is super critical if you want to try to pull Revit schedules and get it and understand what pieces and parts are that you're going to need for each sequence or each package or whatever you want to call it because without that, you don't have the ability to give bill of materials to the shop. So for us, that's a primary tool of any type of add-in that creates assemblies. And spooling is really the pushing of the assembly data down to the individual parts.

Just as a little sample here, these are the different fabrication deliverables we provide-- what we provide out of Revit. We have our spooling drawing up here with the tap dimensions. We typically take-- we took all the dimensions off our spools except for the tap locations. So basically what we do is we rely on accurate content. And we have a bill of material with cut lengths up here in the top right.

That's a little outside the norm. Most fab shops would want to see a dimension here of what this length is. The main reason that is, is because they're going down through, and they're checking everything that was done in the model. So what we found is that becomes a time waster in the shop. So by us removing those dimensions, it actually increased our productivity in the shop. So it is something that's interesting.

There is-- obviously a lot of companies are set up differently. And it is something to be aware of. You are putting a lot of liability into the content that you're using. If your content's accurate, your model is going to be accurate, your pipe cuts are going to be accurate. Those pipe cuts then can go directly to a cutting-- a plasma cutter or automatic, like a tiger stop or some other automated length-measuring tool.

But owning that data and owning the content and then also providing what is needed to fabricate is a big thing. And that's something that you need to really work out in your company because every company has their level of expertise. Sometimes it's in the fab shop. And sometimes it's in the office in the B2C department.

So if you don't have trust-- if your content, you can't trust it, then you definitely want to have dimensions on-- overall dimensions on your spools. So the shop checks you and makes sure that everything's correct. Really, what you need then, is to make sure you have that feedback loop going back into content so that the content gets addressed when there's errors found. So eventually you can get to the point where you can remove a lot of additional checking and validation in the shop.

For us, obviously the other drawings are pretty straightforward, the plans and sections. Revit creates a lot of great annotation and detailing. Obviously being an architectural software at its heritage, it does a great job there. Definitely spend the time getting your tags in order and getting your tags set up to automatically pull the data from the pieces and parts, thus the requirement of a good family library. If you're using fab parts, that's actually a lot easier because the data is consistent on those. So the data from fab parts to tag and annotate is going to be a lot simpler.

I want to jump into Revit a little bit. I want to talk-- I want to show a couple different things around Revit assemblies, a couple different things there. So some of the things I want to show-- we're going to-- I'll just model something up here quickly.

Let's say I come in here and I draw something like this, like that. Now, on this piping, you'll notice that we have some additional pieces of geometry here. Those are actually our work-plane geometry. We use those to snap to for dimensions when you have different pieces of angular connections. So if I come in here and let's say I do something like this, dimensioning that in Revit can sometimes be a chore. So that's where these come in

super handy. You can quickly come in here, grab those, get all the dimensions you need.

For dimensions that are in line with pipe, that's when I'll typically always pull from a piece of pipe because if you come in and you have to regen that elbow, obviously those dimensions are going to be gone. So a lot of that stuff is very important on how you train your team and how they work to make sure that as the models need to be updated and changes come in, that stuff can be addressed properly.

On the valve side, I'm going to put in a flange valve here with the tools we have. For us, using Revit families, I have to come in here and change these two couplings out. And for these, I'm just going to put in a weld-neck flange. And it's going to be on equipment type. The reason I pick a weld-neck flange on here is I want to show some things-- or some things you have to be aware of when you're using Revit assemblies, in Revit, when you're creating assemblies on nested families.

So I'm going to jump over here into spooling view. In our spooling view, if I go to visibility and graphics, I have filters inside here. And those filters, basically, they're looking at the last digit of the spool name. And what that does is, it allows you to create different colors based on different sequences. So 1, 2, 3, so if I have a 103 or a 102 or a 101, it's going to get these three different colors. So that's how all that works.

So now, if I come in here, let's say I go and I create an assembly. I'm going to select from here to here. And you see, I have that flange selected with that nested piece of content in here. I'm going to use Revit's Create Assembly tool. And I'm going to create an assembly CWS-104.

And you can see, it looked like it had that bolt set selected. But actually, when it created the assembly, it didn't select the bolt set. And my geometry here I have for the bolt set is right here. So you can see this is a flange set. This allows me to create a bill of material with bolts and gaskets on everything.

So if I select this assembly right here and I pull a bill, you can see-- I'm going to pull this to the side-- you can see, here's my raised-face gasket and then my weld-neck flange and my bolt set. So as I select these here, you can see that they get selected in the model. There is a gasket in there that you can't quite see. So if I come in here and I take this and I just hide that element, you can see there's the gasket.

Now, inside Revit, when I look at the project browser, I can see I have this spool 104 down here. I can use the Revit method for creating views. You can actually set a default scale. You can come in and set view templates and sheet. And it'll create all that stuff for you. The thing is, though, is it doesn't name the sheet properly. So you have to rename the sheet here, the sheet name. And then you have to apply and add all the views to the sheet.

So let's take a look at that 3D view. So in here, what we can see here is that the bolt sets are not on there, bolt and gasket set. So if I come in and edit this assembly, there's no way for me to add those pieces and parts. So what I have to do is, I have to go back to the spooling view. I have to select the assembly after it's created. I have to edit that assembly. And what I have to do is come in and add those pieces and parts. So I click the bolt set. Now I have to click the gasket and hit Finish.

So it's important whatever add-in you're looking at, whether-- this is piping that we're showing here. Ducts are going to be the same, walls, doors, and all that stuff that has nested families is going to operate the same way inside Revit. So it is something to be aware of, to make sure that that's happening.

Another thing to be aware of is, if I come in here and I copy this assembly, now what this basically did is, if I go to annotate and I tagged by category, and I've got to lock my view. So right here, you can see that's 104. And that's 104, right?

What happens if this piping right here was a different system? So right now, that's chilled water supply. What happens if that was chilled water return? It would have the wrong nomenclature on here. You would want this to be HWR or CWR, depending on the engineer on the project, what they use for system abbreviations. So you see here, you have a problem where you would have two different systems in the same spool name.

There's actually a workaround in Revit that you can get around that. And you can make this create a new spool. You can make Revit think that this assembly right here is different in some way from this one, even though they technically aren't. If I tab over, let's say, one of the components that are in the assembly, what I did is I actually put a parameter in those families and those that parameter. By being in the family, I can make that a project parameter as well.

And that project parameter will allow me to change it on these elements. And Revit will see these as different assemblies. So if I just put anything in here like a three or a one or any text, now this effectively-- this assembly is effectively different than this one, and now it's going to make this one unique.

So that's one of the things our tool does automatically as we're creating assemblies. It's making every assembly unique, even though it looks the same as another or it is the same. That's the little trick right there is having a parameter inside your content and then driving that from the project as a project parameter that will allow you to create unique assemblies on piping systems that are the same.

So if I come in here and take a look at my different parameters in here, you'll notice this is the magic right here is this schedule assembly name. By having that in there that gives you the ability to make those unique. It's a super-neat hack there.

Now, another thing that comes up, we have a lot of times buildings are not square. You and things are off on different angles. So if I go back to the plan view here, let's say I take I'll just draw some additional pieces of pipe over here.

Now, if I select this and let's say I rotate it and let's say my piping is off on an angle because the building's off on this angle. If I come in and create an assembly of this using the Revit assembly tool-- another thing too, is it's not using a formula to name the assemblies. It's just sequentially creating them from the last. So that's another thing to be aware of-- I can create the assembly views.

And if I scroll down, you can see here if I go into the top view, you can see this is what my view looks like. So it's off on an angle. In my assemblies, I want that actually squared off. I don't want that on an angle like this because it's going to be hard for me to detail and tag everything when it's off on this angle. So there's a little trick to this. You go-- I can come in here and I select the assembly and I edit the assembly.

You'll see right here is an origin marker for the assembly. I can use the align tool. I can align, let's say one of these pipes to one of these planes. And what that effectively does is it turns the coordinate system for this assembly squared off to the piping or to what you want to detail.

Now, if I go into these views, I won't actually see anything, that anything changed. So what I have to do, though, is I have to come in and delete these views out. And then when I delete these-- let's see, make sure I got my number. Is it 106? I want to delete that out too. So if I recreate my views, now, if I go-- now, you can see the 3D view is still obviously the correct orientation. But then the elevations and plans now are all squared off to the piping because the origin of the assembly is aligned.

So that's another thing, different add-ins need to be able to do automatically allow you to rotate the views and keep everything lined up and easy to detail. And that becomes even more challenging when you have slow pipes on a project. Make sure you get that correct as well.

Renumbering is a big thing as well because renumbering the pieces and parts that you're detailing can be really laborious. That can also be a challenge. Another thing too, is you see all the different views you have here in the sheets-- what's nice about using Revit assemblies is all this stuff stays organized in your project browser down here at the assemblies.

One thing to keep in mind, though, if I come in here and I right click and I hit Delete on any one of these assemblies, it's going to actually delete the piping and the assembly as well as with the sheets and everything. So if you don't want to do that, which you typically don't, there's an option up in Revit here to disassemble the assembly. And that basically, what that does is it turns it back to individual pieces and parts and it keeps the-- it gets rid of the assembly and all the sheets that are tied to it.

So one of the things that we did in our tool is, I can come into a project and select all the assemblies. And under Actions, I can disassemble them. So on large projects, what we do sometimes is after the fabrication is complete, we either would put the assembly-- put the assemblies in that piping into a workset that's complete and not load it. Or if it's already installed, then we can just disassemble them because we don't need them anymore.

Traditionally the PDFs are the final documentation piece. So depending on what the deliverables are, you can do different things that allow you to simplify your models a little bit. So in this view here, just to show a little bit on how automation can work, if I come in here and I go to metallic tools, we have a tool called Toggle Fuel Material. In this case, I can just grab a couple field joints. And I'll put one here and here because I want to split it there.

And then for me to create the assemblies for this, we have a tool here for auto assembly. I can automatically create my assemblies by field joints. I can start my assemblies from 200. Just click here. It's going to create those assemblies. You click here, it's going to create those assemblies. You can see all the assemblies created to create the views and sheets. You just come in here and grab your template. And it's going to go through and create the views and sheets. It's going to bring the Revit families in, the whole ball of wax.

Let's see. So here, it created the sheets. Yeah, we're going to cancel that. Looks like I was in the middle of that command. So if I come in here now, I want to take a look at this assembly that I have created. Here's 200. I can go into 200 and click Go. Now it's going to create just 200 for me.

It creates a new sheet. It puts the tags on, puts the bill of material, creates all the views. A lot of times what we do on the view side of things is, we won't put a number on the views because by doing that, if you want to delete a couple of your views out because you don't need them, you can. And now you don't have to worry about fixing the numbering. The other thing is, we'll put the text on our view tags, view titles.

We'll make that-- we'll get rid of this line and make this underlined. And then that way, it means I don't have to stretch that line for every view title. So now I can go set that the same way. That's pretty much done as well.

When you start deleting these views off and you don't need them, those still stay in the project. So what we ended up doing is, we created a tool. And it actually reduces a lot of file size. It's actually-- it's over here. It's under Project Maintenance. It allows us to pull the data. Under Utilities, it allows us to delete all the unused assembly views. So that can really reduce the size of your project and reduce a lot of the extra views that are in it.

I want to jump back to my PowerPoint here for a few minutes. Here's that Delete Unused Assembly Views setting. So if you want to try that out-- if you do have-- if you're using any other add-ins, it'll work with that as well. But it'll go through and delete out any of the unused views on any of your assembly sheets.

A big thing for us is DfMA, Design for Manufacturing Assembly. So for us, some of the products and things that we've worked into our workflow and actually helped a lot of customers do into theirs as well, is really standardize the way they pipe up different connections to equipment. So in this case, you can see here, I have a pump. We have one of our pump drops. We have some dimensional data on exactly we know how big they are and what size they are.

So for us, what that does is it makes it super easy to estimate because now we know exactly what products we have. It makes it super easy to source submittals by standardizing the way you're building your projects. And just a pump drop like this, we'd have over six different manufacturers. So in trying to hunt down the submittals and getting that information from all those different vendors can be a real challenge.

On the modeling side, it saves time because obviously for us, we built Revit families for all these. It makes it super easy to model. On the procurement side, it makes it easy to procure as well because now it's just one part. That part then is a kit. You understand all the pieces and parts that come with that. And then it makes it super easy to install because now it's always consistent in one piece.

So there's a lot of areas in a project that you can do this with. You don't necessarily need a manufacturer to do this for you. As a company, you can build these things up yourself. Here's one of the things we did with a pressure-reducing station. Same thing here, is over 10 different manufacturers that are within this drop traditionally. And we reduced it down to one, where you just purchase the actual product and you can install a standardized PRV.

A lot of the other things that we've done around connection, standardizing tap connections, standardizing manifolds, air handlers and coil kits and pump skids and just standardized movement fittings for risers, just a lot of different things in a lot of different ways, we look at a project to help make it easier for us to model it and make it easier to fabricate it, secure it, and install.

Some tricks here-- I want to show some fab tips and tricks on hangers and skids. Big thing for us on the hanger side is we actually use Revit families for hangers. Big thing here is, is we actually use a generic-- we use the generic two-level based family. By doing that, what happens is our hangers have an upper attachment and a lower attachment. So they know what level they're on, and they know what level is above.

And that allows us to put different anchors and hanger rods and specify embed depth lengths and calculate our rod lengths. So it's made-- by building the families like this, it made it super easy for us to manually place these hangers. But then we actually built some tools then to automate the placement of hangers as well. So if you've never used or never saw our hanger families, it's definitely something to take a look at. This single hanger family can be then modified easily into a floor support, because the reference level's there, and also into some type of anchor for support above as well for dealing with movement. So it's a neat little trick.

A big thing for us is a lot of times we're using fabrication parts. And getting the data from Revit fabrication part hangers is really a challenge. So one of the things-- it's a very important tool. Jeremy Tammik has-- it's a Revit lookup add-in It actually has a new version. It looks a little different. They made it a look a little better I think. But the same good data is in there.