On any given construction project, general contractors (GCs) have an extensive list of roles and responsibilities to keep everything on track. From overseeing schedules, safety, and costs to managing resources and personnel, the number of tasks and information can be overwhelming and challenging manage.
Today, more than ever, general contractors need to filter out distractions and cut through the noise to access essential information and workflows, helping them make better decisions and manage projects more efficiently and predictably. At Autodesk, we’re constantly adding product enhancements and features that help project teams work more effectively. In case you missed it, we’re excited to share eight recent features and product launches for Autodesk Construction Cloud that help general contractors stay focused and on track.
Project templates can be incredibly useful, but if you want teams to get the most out of them, they need to be tailored to your team's specific needs and workflows. This is where our new feature, Sample Project Templates, comes in. Now, GCs can quickly kick off projects and standardize data with pre-built, repeatable project templates, including ones for file management, forms, issues, and more. Here’s how it works:
You’re constantly focused on the day ahead, but sometimes you also need to look back and dig up data on completed work. With so many activities happening on a project at any given time, it can be tough to take the time to look back, conduct a retrospective, and trace actions and timelines on your projects.
With Activity Log in Autodesk Construction Cloud, this just got easier. It gives teams quick and easy access to a historical log of activities across the platform. With Activity Log, GCs can rely on a detailed audit trail to protect themselves, in case questions or disputes arise throughout a project.
Commissioning is incredibly important for maintaining the quality of your work and relationships with owners. That said, not every small detail needs to be tracked alone. For example, knowing a light bulb has been installed is helpful, but knowing the conduits are properly placed, the circuit breaker was tested, and the transformer connected are the crucial components of that system that make it all light up.
Enter Asset Systems, which simplifies the management of complex systems by grouping related assets together. Now, GCs can simplify commissioning and handover with full visibility into assets underlying systems.
Unexpected costs and changes can happen at any stage, so we know how important it is to keep track of your construction budget at every milestone in your project. Now, with the new Budget Snapshots feature in Autodesk Build, finance and project controls teams can quickly "snapshot" the budget at any point in time and see not only how it’s changed, but also uncover what's driving changes.
With Budget Snapshots, you can capture the entire budget, compare up to three snapshots so you can see what changed, and easily filter by type for more in-depth analysis. Now, if there’s a sudden cost increase in construction materials or labor, teams can use Budget Snapshots to pinpoint the moment when these shifts happened and link them back to specific project events or decisions.
Greyscale model viewers can make certain decisions trickier, and lead to potential risk. For instance, if a hot pipe and a cold pipe are in the same color, teams may not know which is which. Also, consider how if electrical conduit and pipes look too similar, it could lead to confusion and potential mistakes at installation.
With Object Colors in Autodesk Construction Cloud, you now get simple visual cues for complex differences in 3D models. BIM Managers can now view models in color, so they can easily see differences in progress, object types, and more. This helps improve communication in coordination and gives you greater control over how colors are applied. With this release, BIM managers and other team members can choose to turn colors on by default in clash detection or keep the standard red-green clash highlighting. If you’d like, you can also turn colors on for ghosted background objects.
We’re making it simple for general contractors to use Autodesk Construction Cloud with existing tools with easy-to-implement API integrations. We now have over 400 integrations in the Autodesk Construction Cloud ecosystem, and we’re excited to highlight a few integrations that have been commonly requested by our GC customers:
As part of our continued effort to simplify payment applications for general and specialty contractors, we’ve made it easier to manage and make payments to your trade partners.
In many countries, for example, it’s common to pay a percentage of a subcontract in advance, which is then recovered throughout the construction contract lifecycle. We’re excited to share that our Cost Management solution now supports this workflow by allowing users to create advance payments with recoupment settings in Cost Payment Applications.
We know that you and your team of RFI managers and coordinators put together detailed responses to RFIs. A common request from customers is that you want to attach a file to your official RFI response and make it easy to know which files are a part of the RFI question and the response. This feature is now live in Autodesk Construction Cloud, helping bring more detail and context to your RFI workflows.
These are just a few of the many new features we’ve launched specifically for general contractors recently. Looking for more? Check out our 45+ new product releases and learn more about how we support GCs here.
