Training and Implementing Fabrication-Workflow Solutions

STEPHAN SCHNELL: My name is Stephan Schnell. I work for Frank M. Booth as my day job. I also work for the UA as an instructor on the local level, and instructor for the international level.

And we're part of a BIM team, and we're going to be talking a little about that today. And as you can see, training in implementing fabrication-workflow solutions. I'm going to turn it over to my co-speaker.

ERIC POSEY: My name's Eric Posey. I'm out of Indianapolis, Indiana. I work for Greiner Brothers. We're a smaller firm, three detailers doing the full BIM workflow. Started out in the trades as a union pipefitter. Worked as a trainee delivering parts, moved up to my apprenticeship, started taking extra detailing classes throughout my apprenticeship on my own through the union.

I moved on to become a detailer at our shop, and moved into Revit about two years ago. And now we're doing all of our start to finish detailing in Revit. Stephan uses a CADmep workflow. And so we're going to show you just the overall fabrication workflow, not really specific if you work in a certain software, but what the capabilities are of those workflows.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: So this is our class summary. I'm not going to read it out to you guys. You guys can read it yourselves. Eric covered about basically what we're going to be talking about.

ERIC POSEY: Absolutely.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: OK, so we're going to show you some things that I'm not sure a lot of you guys have seen before. And hopefully, you guys come out of this class scratching your head a little bit with some new knowledge in your back pocket.

OK, so here's our learning objectives-- identify strategies, save material, cut down waste. And the second one is probably one of my favorites-- discover the value of precision cutting automation. OK, we'll get more into that a little bit later.

OK, and we all know about CAD and Revit. And then, what I would look at as one of the important things-- welcome-- is try to get the most information out of the model to help the contractor, right?

I see a lot of people drawing a lot of stuff. And it kind of goes in the garbage. Not a lot of value added there. OK, so I challenge myself everyday-- is what can we pull out of the model. And we'll talk about some of that stuff [? as ?] the class goes on.

And just as a general know, I kind of want this to be a two way street discussion. We have a lot to cover, but I want to know about what you guys are doing. And if you guys have a question during the presentation, I'll be happy to answer it. We hope to have enough time for a conversation at the end.

So we're here with the UA. You see our membership is pretty big. We are in four different countries. We have 338,000 members. We're 125 years old, 400 different locals in Canada and America. We consist of plumbers, pipefitters, sprinkler fitters, and service technicians.

So can I get a raise of hands of who's heard of the UA? Who hasn't? OK, so we have a lot of horsepower and a lot of needs to attend to. Let's go back to this. Do you want to talk a little bit more about the UA?

ERIC POSEY: Yes, so we spend a lot of money on training, right? So there's a lot to cover, because we're not just doing BIM and CAD, we're doing-- we're teaching-- apprentices how to solder, we're teaching guys how to weld pipes together. There's a broad spectrum.

We spend a quarter of a billion in training a year. Each year we spend that much, second to only the US military. So we spend a lot of money on training.

We're spending a lot of money now-- a lot of our emphasis is going into BIM training. So every year, how do you train 330,000 members on new technology that exponentially increases every year? Every year we send all of our instructors from individual locals up to Michigan.

And we have an annual training conference called ITP. And it's a train the trainer atmosphere, so we're all here as trainers. We send our instructors up. We teach them all about BIM. We have classes for Revit, AutoCAD, [INAUDIBLE] stations, laser scanners, BIM 360 Field and Glue-- just the whole spectrum.

We do job site technology. So we cover the whole overview of BIM. What's that about? And we also have classes on installation methods and anything you could ever imagine with pipe, we train it.

So we send all of our instructors up, kind of a pyramid scenario. They all go back and they teach their individual locals, all their apprentices. So that's how we get the word out and how we start training BIM.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: So we have over 400 million hours per year that is dedicated to the UA-- the UA labor. And this is my projection, not-- we don't have real data on this. I think 75% of those hours could benefit by BIM, because there are a number of those hours could be-- 10% of those hours used could be dedicated to providing BIM. So that means we need 20,000 detailers.

That's a lot of people to train, a lot of-- and as we all know, there's a lot of-- it's a evolving thing. It's not learn one thing tomorrow, train it for the next 10 years, and you're good to go. As you guys saw this week, it's evolving.

So now we're talking about-- so a little history on myself, I started in this industry in 1999. I'm a plumber, pipefitter by trade. And I made the move to-- we'll call it BIM in 2006.

This first part of it, we're going to be talking about the workflows that I produce for my company. And we're Frank M. Booth. We're probably a bigger mid-sized company and I live near San Francisco, California. We have a couple of shops in northern California, one near Sacramento and San Francisco. So we revenue about $100 million a year, and that's between sheet metal, piping, mechanical piping, and plumbing.

So the owner of my company, he pulled me into his room, his office, and said, I am tired, tired, tired of wasting material. And he saw the need to find a different path. And he wanted labor savings and materials savings. So a couple of things I wanted to point out was, it was a decision from the top.

As the labor's concerned, we've always been progressive, but it's hard to get change. All right? So when it comes from a top down, it's a lot easier. So we wanted to work in controlled conditions. We wanted to be safer and we wanted to solve issues with, say shop, but we'll just say before it left the facility. We didn't want them to solve the problems in the field. We were looking for predictable labor savings.

So don't want to dig too deep in this, but this is a slide of some risk factors. So the risk factors in the field, the field conditions, we have a higher number to it. So we used to be 20%, and this is rough. 20% of our labor was dedicated to the shop and the rest to the field. So there was more risk. There you see 26% risk. And then our goal was to be 50/50. We're not quite there, but we're able to lower our risk factor down by 6%. And for us, that was a big deal. That's going to get us more work.

So now we're going to cover the workflows, right? So we're going to go from A to Z. This is what I get every day. I manage our department and this is a typical design intent from engineering [INAUDIBLE]-- sorry about that, guys. We have any engineers in the room? No?

ERIC POSEY: Yeah, one.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Where? Sorry. So engineers give us their design intent, right? This is a plumbing drawing with the underground layout intent. So we take this, and this workflow's in AutoCAD using FABmep. And we actually put real geometry in there. Real fittings, real components, data we can extract out later.

From there, our workflow is-- we're going to coordinate it, we're going to chop it up for spools. And we have a QA/QC process to making sure that what we draw is what we're going to install. And that was one of the mandates from the owner. He's like, I want to draw what we're going to install as close to 100% as we can.

So then from the model it create spool sheets, the spool sheets have everything we need to build that spool, per the model. Any questions so far? From there, we take we take that spool sheet, and now it's part of a spool map, basically where it lives in the building. We gave him a plan view, an ISO view.

Now our job is to extract all the data out of the model. We usually do that by using BOMs. None of this is groundbreaking, yet, except the fact that we're pulling 100% of the information out of there. From there we pull out all the information to make labels, right? So every piece of pipe that gets installed has a label. That label is associated with a spool sheet, and has all the pertinent information on it.

So this is where it gets interesting. Every piece of pipe through our building goes through an optimization cut list. So each piece of pipe is optimized to get the fullest value out of its. So you can see, those are all stock lengths. We're trying to get 240 inches. I think all of them were within an inch or two. Following this method, we were able to get down to 3% waste.

So last project we completed there was a $4 million budget for material, and we spent $3 million in material, so we had 25% savings following this workflow. So from here, this list gets sent through a machine, that we send our cut list to, that pushes the material to a saw. And that those labels that you saw matched the cut list for the machine.

So the machines called a TigerStop. And you can see on the left right there, that's the arm pushing the tool to the cutter. And we have two cutters to choose from. And the cutters, you probably already have them at your shop. All we did was put some tables on it. And all that tool is just an arm. So to give you an idea of the value of it, we were able to pay it off in, I'd say, easily less than two months.

So we tripled our productivity for cutting pipe because there was no tape measure. It was literally-- list says we're doing all four-inch pipe, we stack the tray full of for four-inch pipe, and we just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And we can divide it with adjusted time, delivery, workflow. What did Whatever we released to do today, level one, area A, we grab all the cut lengths for that area, we throw it in our optimization software.

Kind of went over that, so we also make our foreman fill out how they want the spools. We make them liable. So now they're engaged. We'll go over it a little bit later, we give them all the tools for them to be engaged, and we make them order the spools how they want it to be delivered.

AUDIENCE: Question.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: How do you mark the piece-- spool number after you cut it, before it goes into fabrication?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: How do we what?

AUDIENCE: When you cut-- you're cutting a bunch of pieces, right? [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: How do you mark that to correlate with the spool number, so that when it goes into fabrication, they know what--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: So the guy who cuts the pipe has the labels with it. That's how we mark the pipe. So, yeah?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] Microsoft-- are you manually typing in how long a piece is? Or is it generated through a different file format like MAJ that's pushing it through?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Right, so the question was, do we manually do it? Manually input the cut lengths or do we have a list? So we start off manually doing it, and then that company offers a optimization software. We built our own and we send cut lists that's already optimized to the machine. It's all Excel based.

I can window the entire floor, spit out a cut list for all thread rod, or pipe, whatever, anything that could fit under that saw. And then we send out to Excel and then, behind the scenes, we work with a foreman with their delivery needs. And say, all right, we're released to work in this area. That means we need to get this material procured. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: So on that note, when you match-cut like that, you're obviously cutting multiple spools at one time to create efficiency in the total developed length of pipe, correct?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yes.

AUDIENCE: How do you manage that and sort that to come back together for the fabrication process later?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: That's a great question. So to be the most efficient way possible, down to 3% material waste, it's a lot of handling.

AUDIENCE: Right, so aren't you losing efficiency in the material handling? And the reason I'm asking is because I've been to multiple NCA fabrication--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yes.

AUDIENCE: seminars and I'm not trying to knock what you're doing, I'm trying to figure out--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

STEPHAN SCHNELL: I know.

AUDIENCE: --talking about.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Last week I had a long conversation with my boss. So in San Francisco Bay Area, it's not a cheap place to live. Journeymens build out at $110 an hour.

AUDIENCE: Right.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: So we said, how much material waste is acceptable for one hour of extra work? So what we did was we took like 3/8 all thread. Anyone know how much it costs a foot? Any estimators in here? I want to say it was like a quarter a foot or $0.50 a foot. We were saying, all right, well, this amount of waste is acceptable to save an extra hour of sorting, because that was an issue. And we wound up batching things a little tighter with a little bit more waste. So we've had this tool for probably a year and a half, and it's not ending how we use it. We're constantly changing it.

Where was I? So this is what our shipment looks leaving the shop. We'll go over hangers in a little bit, but you see how our pipe's set up? We have our spools marked, we actually put the spool maps in a binder. And, actually, I take that back. We stopped doing that. We use an iPad for the foreman to figure out what they're getting. I think I showed it in the last slide. This sheet, right here, is produced by the foreman and that sheet is on that cart, taped to it.

And I think everyone is familiar with total station, then we go out to the job site, we lay it out. That's kind of the workflow for the total station. We give them a greyed out drawing of architectural background, the pipe runs, and then with our different pertinent points from the total station. We're laying out change of direction, we're laying risers out, we're laying a separate one for trenches. So the guy who's excavating all this only wants to see the trench layout, so we provide that.

So we're not there on every job, but we're getting very good at becoming 100% paperless by using Box. A couple other different tools, but primarily Box with the [? field, ?] so they have real-time information. Kind of point that out there. So our field foreman have an [INAUDIBLE] model, our building material, our spool sheets, every day that they need, right there on an iPad, with real-time information. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: That non-spoolable materials, you set that report to filter out everything that's already been spooled so you can generate that?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: That's under procure the material. We haven't seen a ton of value by going down that sphere, tracking what's been installed. We can easily do with barcoding. I pitched it, and we haven't done it for because we haven't really seen the value of it. I bet you, if I do the same class next year, we would go over that. But I think we will do it. I think there is value there.

Right, so now we're going over hanger workflows. So like I said before, I'm liable for drawing exactly what's going to be installed. And with that being said, I'm having to get to the level of detail of managing all this data, and to get different cut lengths and dimensions all the way down to the rod size, insert size to the dec. Three different people have to bless this before we start on every job, every floor, because things change. And so this is what we're building to. That's just a typical, concrete insert.

Big deal in California is seismic. We started attaching seismic kits to the piping-- lying, to the hangers. That was a big deal. That was a huge, huge, huge time saver. And we're able to bulk order all of this material. Does anyone deal with seismic? Raise their hands. So is seismic an issue with you guys? Yeah, so it's a nightmare. I'll show some slides on that. We're able to bulk order the kits to drive down the price. So I'm kind of going down the road of I hire a guy, he's giving this information the start of the job, he's ready to go, there's not a lot of questions.

I'm sorry, that was representing the hanger spacing rod sizes. Hanger lay out. I don't think this is anything new. But we're able to get to the level of detail Yeah?

AUDIENCE: So you guys aren't racking your pipes or anything like that?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Oh, yeah.

AUDIENCE: OK, because everything I've seen here, it looks like it's all in a different hanger.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: You talking about hanger racks?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I just didn't pick that. Yeah, if we had two hours, I would. So this example here's going over our hanger layout. We're all color coded so when the guy installs the hangers, he's holding something red, he's looking for a red insert. And he also has a seismic kit ready to go. So you'll notice, this GR-02X is associated with a seismic, and I don't have it shown there. It has all the components there, so the guy in the shop sees an X, he knows what components to attach to that hanger.

And we have a hanger map. And then obviously, we extract all the deck insert bill of material.

AUDIENCE: Can I ask a question.

ERIC POSEY: You've got a question.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: When you guys do your Trimble layout and your hanger drawings, do your names coincide with each other? Or do--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Oh, so same name?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yeah, so we actually go back and manually put the seismic kit letter in there.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

AUDIENCE: So when you guys were going to lay out all your Trimble files that your Trimble hanger number Is one? Now when you guys go to fabricate your hangers, does the hanger number that's on that label coincide with the Trimble number [INAUDIBLE].

STEPHAN SCHNELL: So typically in the deck, the type of insert doesn't change, but we haven't had to do that. They know on this deck, here's your inserts for that deck and they're all pre-painted. If we had to do two different types, somewhere I would sort it out by this number's for this type of insert, another number's for another type of insert. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: Do you have an easier way to move all those bubbles around so they're legible or is there [INAUDIBLE]?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Are they not legible? No, well, yeah, they're legible now, but when you--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yeah.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

AUDIENCE: --all those, it takes a while to--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: There's definitely some work in there.

AUDIENCE: So there's not really a better way to do that?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Not that I know of. So we have bill of material. And then same thing, it gets optimized again. There's our hanger level. What it looks like. Here's how we sort them. [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: What's the elevation?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yeah, so I can go over all that. So we have the number, the floor, the area, and then if we need to subdivide the area, we subdivide the area rod size, rod length. And the TigerStop that we use works in the decimal inches. Does anyone have decimal inches in there? The lists that we send to them it has you know 8 and 7/8 in decimal inches. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: The elevation, is that for a pipe or a hanger?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: That's, including insulation, bottom of hanger. Bottom of pipe, which is bottom of hanger.

AUDIENCE: OK.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: We don't get to the level of oh, good, move it up an eighth of an inch. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yeah, so we do top and bottom. S we've gone back and forth. Center, center of pipe, top and bottom, and we've--

AUDIENCE: Well, you've got insulation and that drops the hanger down and--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: This is including insulation. So workflow, kind of the same. So I kind of want to point out one thing here. So this is all thread rod stack from the TigerStop. To give you an idea of how fast it is, the guy who puts on the label is slower than the guy who cuts the rod. There's an example, right there, of one of our carts. You can tell this is our footprint of the floor. This is for, you can't tell here, but I think we had area A in four quadrants. So what we try to do, is we try to have one cart for one area. We try not to have this cart be for four different areas. So the guys not walking around the floor.

AUDIENCE: Do you use special labels that don't get damaged in FireStopping or anything like that?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: I've been asked that question before about labels. We've gone back and forth with labels. We use a label that can get wet. We don't care about long term. It's more for installation purposes.

AUDIENCE: Right. Right. Sticking to No-Hub?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Huh?

AUDIENCE: It'll stick to No-Hub?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: We found one that sticks to No-Hub. I mean, if it's super dirty and oily, it's not going to work. I want to say, last time I looked, we weren't writing the spool number on No-Hub. But we have, in the past, used a grease pen. You know, write the information out on the pipe. We've probably, in the past, you would probably use three different types of labels. The ones where I'm showing, the things are obsolete now. In that, we're using a yellow one. So same kind of thing. This is our-- what it looks like when I leave the building.

So now Eric's going to talk about his Revit workflow. Before we start, do we have any questions about this workflow? Yeah.

AUDIENCE: So for your [INAUDIBLE] put your top attachment on there [INAUDIBLE], are you modeling those so you can strike those out? Or are you just giving the length--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: So we keep the information in the hanger. So when we place a hanger, it knows what type of attachment it's associated with.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yeah. So, yeah, we say when you pick this hanger, this hanger's for Tolco 109. Or we have another one for a beam clamp, so on, and so on. Take it away, Eric.

ERIC POSEY: Thank you. Yeah, so like I said in the introductions, my company we were in AutoCAD. And, actually, we hired on a guy that, at his previous contractor, he had done an entire job in AutoCAD for a university that had really strict BIM standards. And at the end of the job, he found out buried in the spec, that they had a Revit Deliverable. And they fought, and fought, and said, let us out. You know, they didn't want to have to try to-- and they weren't going to accept inserting their CAD drawing into a Revit model and saying, here you go, which people have tried, and it works sometimes. So he learned Revit by having two screens, and redrawing everything that was already installed in Revit.

And so he came on with my company and said, you know, you really need to be switching to Revit. There's a lot of advantages to it. And I was like most people in the room are. I knew AutoCAD, why do I need to switch? AutoCAD's working fine for me. And so he kept staying in my ear, staying in my ear. So, finally, I said OK, I'm going to start trying out my flat systems. I'm going to do my [? MEG ?] gas systems, and I'm going to do my plumbing systems. I was really scared of jumping Revit and doing gravity piping, slow piping-- just scared the hell out of me.

So I started simple, nice, flat systems. And after doing a job in that, the next job I tried the gravity piping in Revit and not using AutoCAD at all. And started having success with that. And once I started to figure out the workflow, our whole company uses it now. So we went through those growing pains. It's easy to do when you're this little shop. If you're this big company with 20, 40, 50 detailers and you have these massive CADmep databases, it's really hard switch to make.

And now with 2017, and you're starting to see that ITM functionality inside of Revit, it's really giving people an incentive to hop over. So our struggle at my company is we came from PD-3D. So we did have a nice database to start with. So we figured out the Revit part and now our deal is content. So we're building that database now, whereas most people are going to come in to Revit with it. So you guys- those of you that already have the database, will be a step ahead.

So I do have a few slides here. So this is a little bit of a case study of one job we did. I'm from Indiana. This is in New Castle, Indiana, and this is a correctional facility. So we got a job, and from the engineer, all we got was a 2D CAD drawing of basically how this pipe was going to go around the entire campus of the prison. We had the fence with the barbed wire at the top, we had to stay out of that area, a lot of roads, and parking lots, and different buildings. So we got this 2D CAD drawing.

This is the first job I've done where we weren't actually doing a true BIM coordinating with sheet metal, and electrical, and sprinkler. This is the first time where we were the only ones and we got this job. It was all underground steam piping, condensate piping with steam vaults. And so this kind of shows you we started out in Revit, started making families for the frames that we were going to build. We were on a really strict timetable with this job. So when Stephan said this is a time savings out in the field, when you can do all that labor in the shop, in controlled conditions, and ahead of time. We didn't have this available to us out in the field yet, so we were able to start in the shop, designing and fabricating before we actually got out there.

So what you can see here in this picture at the top left there, you see ISO view of one of the vaults. You know the beauty of what we do is Revit, you can take any view you're looking at the entire project or the entire model. So we can set up different views and hide things. So here, you can't see the steam vaults and you see some different views. Top view, you see the actual blueprint that we sent out, and then you see a nice IOS view of a completed prefab vault assembly.

So we built these as modules, so we were able to set them on the truck, take them, and when we got out to the site, we had the hole dug with the backhoe. We dropped the bottom piece of the vault in, we took these straight off the truck, put straps on them, dropped them right inside, and then they piped up to them. You have four field welds. Before, we would have had the stub in, and crawl down in a manhole, and tried to have connect all this piping inside of there. So by doing it this way, we're able to drop it in. And before you put that top cap of the vault, these were three-piece vaults, so before we put on that top cap and made it a confined space, we're able to drop in and make these four field welds. And then we'd put the top cap on.

And so we talk about fabrication. As far as safety goes, that's one of my favorite things. It's one of the cool things you can talk about with fabrication, is the safety. And just the fact that we don't have confined space, and the tripod set on top of the manhole, and oxygen monitors, and a guy watching those monitors, that's a lot of labor savings right there. And the fact that we could build all this in controlled conditions.

So this is right out of Revit, as well, these were renderings. Once I completed a vault, you see up here-- I've got to figure out this laser pointer here. Oh, no. There it goes. There it is. With 2017 Revit, which is what we're on, we're able to intermix ITMs and Revit families. So what we have here is, we have the pre-cast vault. This was modeled as a family, so those of you that aren't Revit users, families are like AutoCAD blocks, but they're really, really intelligent. They're like dynamic blocks with even more intelligence, and a lot of custom properties.

So we're able to build this one vault with an adjustable manhole, so no matter where the vault was placed on the project, we could pull that manhole up and snap it right to finish grade, and we knew exactly what that sea level elevation was going to be. I'm so used to being inside the building and you give them the distance to the finish floor. Out here, the elevation of that manhole lid was something like 1,050.38 feet, so it's decimal feet. All that goes out to our total station.

It's hard to see on this picture. Up here, you have an anchor block and at the very tip top there, you'll see a little cube, and that's a APL point. So we're able to take these families and drop APL points inside of them. And every time I place an anchor block, now I've got four points for my total station. So he can go out there in the middle of a wide open field, and actually shoot in exactly where that backhoe needs to dig for that anchor block. And then, same thing, you can't see them in this picture, but we put four points on the top corners of all these vaults. So these vaults were built where I can grow them. They actually ended up, by the time we value engineered everything, we ended up with the same sized vault on all four vaults.

But we place points on those, we place points on hangers, do some really neat things with it. Anytime we had these anchor plates here, you can't see the block in this picture, but you can see it in this picture. This is the same view, just different rendering styles. So whenever we had these plates, we had a APL point inside of those, so they knew exactly where the piece went with the anchor plate. And these literally took a couple minutes to make a view like this. You just change the visual style. It knows to put in the shadows, and it's a neat thing. It makes it look like I know a lot about visualization and I don't.

Now I'm having trouble switching slides now. There it goes. Yeah. So now that we have the design, we've got to fabricate it. So we had to make a lot of different drawings on this one project. All these drawings are embedded inside of the one model. So we have drawings up here-- were drawings I made for our foreman, just so he knew what was going to be coming on that truck. So the insulated piping you see hanging off the end was field piping. Anything you see within that frame there was going to be fabricated by us, sent out on a truck with the straps on it, so we could drop it in.

I had to make drawings here for the pre-cast vault company. So those were coming from Kentucky, and so I had to figure out where all my holes were going to be, what size the holes needed to be for Link-Seal purposes. Now there's charts that we use to determine all that. And so I sent the vault company a top view ISO view. And you can see north arrows, and compasses, all of the section views are right here inside the same model. And then it's real quick to build these sheets this way. And then I have a side view of each side of that vault, what all walls, where do I need holes, where do the holes go. That was actually a really useful thing for us to do, because the design drawings would have had us going right through that seam there, right where that split in the vault was. So we had to actually adjust the vaults quite a bit, and increase the manhole leaks, in order for us to come in the middle of that slab.

Over here, it shows in different elevations so they knew where to position the vaults. Started to show them some dimensions, center-to-center dimensions. Over here, we had some steam trap assemblies inside the vaults, so all of that was dimensioned for them. I had some additional drawings. I don't know if they're in the slide, but you know it really broke down like what size a pipe is this, how do you how do you build it. So these are miscellaneous spool sheets. We've got to really start building this in the FAB shop now. So the vaults all had a T-Vent. That T-Vent had a mounting flange on the bottom of it. This was built as a Revit family.

Over here, you see a piping spool sheet. So a lot of guys will say you can't spool in Revit. Yes, you can. I do it all the time. If you have any questions on spooling in Revit, we do have a booth out here. If you walk in the door, over to the back right. Been showing people how I spool in Revit. But this is a good example. This is intermixing families with ITM files. So the piece you see right here, that is a bought off-the-shelf piece. And we were able to build that as a family with piping connectors on it, and then you can take ITMs with the real piping components, and actually snap those right to it, and spool it out, tag it. So we're using the Victaulic Tools to do all the tagging and bill of materials. It's a really cheap, nice add-on that we've found.

This is another spool of steam configuration with a gate valve. And it actually connected into that T you see there that's open-ended. Didn't want to give them a big, awkward piece that they had to try to build on stands. You wouldn't have ever been able to rotate that, and get everything trim and level.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?

ERIC POSEY: Yeah. I didn't know this till this week when I took their class, but they've got it now to work with live schedules. So, as you make changes in your model, the schedules are live. This used to be static, and the one you see here was static. So once you build it, it came in as a text block. And it was cool, because you could edit it, so if there was a piping component, maybe you don't quite have the real fitting, you could actually change the text. There were a lot of cases of that, where I might not like the way that the ITM might describe the item. I could just edit the text. But now they got working with live schedules, and as you move pipe around, and pieces shorten and lengthen, all that's dynamically changed in your bill of materials now. I had a question over here?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, the ITM content, have you seen any hurdles as far as getting stuff scheduled. Getting the bill of materials set up. It was a little tricky [INAUDIBLE] features, so I was wondering between real Revit content and that, is there any tricks or things to do?

ERIC POSEY: Yeah, so the question is, how do you schedule the ITM content. The out-of-the-box Revit way to do that would be if you right click on Schedule, and you add a new schedule. In 2017, they've recategorized the ITM files as MEP fabrication pipework. And so you build the schedule to find anything that's MEP fabrication pipework, and then you use filters to narrow it down if it's pipe or if it's fittings. If you stop by the booth, I could run you through that a little bit better. But yeah, it's kind of like your other schedules in Revit. But you can't use your old pipe and pipe fitting schedules that used with families. You have to have special schedules built up just for the ITM files.

So this is us in our fab shop. We have a-- trying to remember the size of It. I think it's about a-- I'm not going to mess up with our fab shop numbers, but I think it's about 10,000 square foot. But all along the wall, we have rows of pipe different sizes, different materials. And this is them building the frames, and you see the hangers [INAUDIBLE] on it. Everything was galvanized since it was down in a m wet area. And then we started building everything on stands. We had the overhead crane up there, so that's really been a blessing to us on getting the fabrication done. And then some different views of us actually building the pieces in the shop.

So I'll back up a slide because we're not quite done yet. So what we've done, we ended up taking all these pieces, building them together. This is actually going on since I came out here, I just don't have great photos yet. We built these just like you saw on the drawings. We put them on a flatbed truck, we sent them up there this past week, dropped them right in. I heard good feedback, they fit right up, so we're good there. Threw out a lot at you in a short amount of time. I'm sure you guys all have questions, so does anybody--

AUDIENCE: I'd like to get feedback--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Did it again.

ERIC POSEY: I got it when I-- Man, you lost your whole pack and everything, didn't you? It's really wrapped up. So the way that's wrapped up-- crazy thing happened right before I came up here. I've got tell this story while Stephan's getting ready. So I went down, did everybody see the little mini drones at the booth down there? So I went down and I asked if they had any drones. And the lady said, no, we're sold out, but we just had a guy return one and we turned it on, it works fine. And I was like, well I'll take it, if it works.

And she's like, well, I just wanted you to know that information, because I don't want to sell it to you and like it's actually broke. I said, well, can we turn it on and see it? And they turned it on, and it flew straight from the table right into the lady's hair. And all four of those motors tangled her hair up in different directions. And I stood at the table down there for about 10 minutes while they unwrapped her hair out of each propeller. So Stephan's microphone there reminded me of how that was tangled up in her hair. So I want to get feedback, maybe from both of you, with a Revit deliverable workload compared to a fabrication one. I use [INAUDIBLE] I never really used fabrication or Revit for deliverables [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Right.

AUDIENCE: Do you guys, like, from what I see, the Revit one is made [INAUDIBLE] doesn't have an automated process cut in sections like you had for your vault [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHAN SCHNELL: It's manual.

AUDIENCE: It's all manual for--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: You can do it, yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] you set up different view ports on your sheet--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHAN SCHNELL: You have a lot of the same options. Yeah, like sheets and revenues pretty much you set up and it's already automated. You're still doing--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: So

AUDIENCE: --manual sheets [INAUDIBLE]--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: Yeah, so I'm going to praise Revit and bash Revit. It is by far a way better tool than CAD. It's a lot easier to use. They lack content. So there's some workflows that Eric's using that is wonderful using Victaulic Tools, third-party software. So my workflow includes every piece of pipe that goes out on the job. So we're talking about 3/8 refurb piping to 30-inch carbon steel, and everything in between. I haven't seen anyone do that yet with Revit without using third-party software. Is anyone doing that right now in Revit?

AUDIENCE: We're starting [INAUDIBLE]--

STEPHAN SCHNELL: What are you using?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] .

STEPHAN SCHNELL: So you're managing your own content?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

AUDIENCE: We had been using Siskiyou in the past, but we're getting away from it. [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHAN SCHNELL: So Siskiyou has a solution, very expensive solution. And I'm kind of waiting to see how this shakes out, what we can use. I know I'm going to use Revit. I teach Revit. But I can't look at the owner of my company in the face and say, I can do it better in Revit right now.

ERIC POSEY: And that's the instance I speak on, when we're a shop of three guys and how many detailers do you have?

STEPHAN SCHNELL: 14.

ERIC POSEY: Yeah, 14 detailers. And you have a really nice database already. You really have to prove to somebody that you're going to save them that much money by switching to this other product. Because you know 100% there's going to be heavy training costs. We're trying through the UA, we're trying to make that up for our contractors, we're trying to train them so their contractors don't have to take that burden. So we've added Revit classes into our curriculum.

STEPHAN SCHNELL: As the UA, we hear the Revit train coming, we're preparing ourselves for that push right now. The UA is very, very proactive in involvement. We actually have a BIM training specialist from the UA in the audience today. Ken, right here. Say hi, Ken.