Productivity Tracking with Assemble

Construction is a difficult game,” Hunt said. “There are a lot of things that make our job difficult. Working with our own data shouldn’t be one of them.” Dee Cramer has become one of the largest heating, ventilating, and air conditioning companies in the country. With productivity tracking in mind, what the company really needed was a live feed from the project’s Autodesk Revit model. If a user could change the status of the model’s components to live feed, Hunt knew the company could track the workflow, including hours, margin and profitability. Hunt said another motivation for making a change came from realizing the industry is moving toward designers being more willing to share their design content in native Revit with contractors before projects are awarded – in the pre-bid stage.

The following priority project goals were identified: 

1) Use design models to help the team develop bids. 

2) Easily harvest data from working with ductwork to produce reports. 

3) Implement Assemble Systems for pre-construction design and planning. 

4) Compare production results to the original estimate and budget.

Dee Cramer chose Assemble Systems to transform the way information in the BIM process is accessed and used for construction management. Assemble enables companies to condition, query and connect data to key workflows – bids, estimates, project management, scheduling, site management, and finance. As Hunt put it, “Assemble is a big tool.” The software is “object-centered” and transitions a design model into a construction model.

The critical functions that were important to Dee Cramer were: 

1) Estimating from a designer’s model, saving time and providing better accuracy. 

2) Productivity tracking for shop and field work using the Revit model to beat the budget. Rather than having information in silos, Dee Cramer could use Assemble to leverage all the data in the models seamlessly using the interoperability of the Autodesk connected tools.

“Just mining the data is probably worth $50,000 per year,” Hunt estimated. “When introducing workflows, they can get leveraged in ways that we haven’t even thought about. The world is our oyster.” After sixteen months, Dee Cramer is ready to take it to the next level. Development of the interface between BIM 360 and Assemble is nearly complete, enabling them to work in tandem for bi-directional communication on tracking productivity metrics. Coding and setup were needed in the company’s database to customize the company’s use of the Revit model data. Dashboards have been set up where production and accounting data can now be sent for reporting, rather than to multiple products (silos). Information is populated to the dashboards from a live feed of the BIM 360 data as the project is happening. Those dashboards – called Target Mission Control – include tracking metrics: • For BIM – lineal feet per hour. • In the shop – pounds per hour. • In the field – lineal feet per hour.

Hunt said, “We’ve been collecting this data in a number of forms for decades involving several people.” Assemble streamlines data collection for Dee Cramer and eliminates busy work. With the partnership of Applied Software and Autodesk, Dee Cramer is finding that Assemble Systems helps understand the company’s costs and enables them to do more work. While users still need additional training in Assemble, the tool is already helping the company track and reduce costs. Dee Cramer is better positioned to win more work and be more productive completing it. “The future is bright,” Hunt said. “The savings could be immense.”