By combining BIM with construction project management tools, all groups within a project, from the architect to the subcontractors, have access to information like never before, both companies said.

“In the past, there used to be islands of information here and there with no central location for everyone to access,” Jordan Brandt, a partner at Horizontal LLC, said in an interview with ConstructionSoftwareReview.com.  “But now, we’ve developed a way to leverage all the information contained within a BIM model so that everyone has instant access to the same information.”

It took about a year for Meridian and Horizontal to integrate the spatial and design data from BIM with the operational business data from the project management software. The integrated software harnesses the Horizontal Glue Server, which is a Web-based portal that acts as a central hub and allows information to pass seamlessly between the BIM models and Meridian’s Prolog and Proliance tools. When used properly, the results can lead to a reduction of costs and schedules in the planning, building and operating of capital projects and facilities.

For example, when something is added to a BIM model, such as a request for information or material quantities, it can be pushed to Proliance and Prolog in order to populate data fields. So, basically, when the BIM model is changed, all of the associated costs and related information can be tracked using Proliance or Prologue. 

“There are a lot of synergies between BIM and infrastructure lifestyle management,” Sue Watkins, director of marketing at Meridian System, said. “We see this as a disruptive change to the way that things have been traditionally done.”

So far, both Watkins and Brandt have said that they’ve heard nothing but positive responses from users. “Those who have used both software offerings have said that there has been a gap,” Brandt said. “From those who I’ve talked to, they are happy that we’ve bridged that gap.”

For more information on the benefits of both tools, check out Meridian’s white paper entitled, BIM and Project Management: Advancing Integrated Project Delivery on Capital Building Programs.

It is with that in mind that we have begun offering book excerpts to readers of ConstructionSoftwareReview.com. When we introduced you to Building Information Modeling in back in September, we pointed you to our excerpt from McGraw-Hill Professional’s aptly titled Building Information Modeling.

Now we are happy to offer two sets of excerpts for construction project management professionals; these come to us from Paul E. Harris, an Australian author and consultant who’s a certified cost engineer through AACE International and an approved trainer on the PRINCE2 project management method.

Our Primavera software book excerpts are aimed at users of P6, P3 and SureTrak. Each excerpt includes two or more chapters and demonstrates to readers practical tasks such as using Group & Sort parameters and Layout functions in Primavera P6, defining activity codes in Primavera P3 and using global and activity calendars in Primavera SureTrak.

Meanwhile, our four Microsoft Project software book excerpts each offer a different take on using MS Project for construction project management. There’s a user guide for planning and scheduling, there’s a list of “tricks and traps” that the author describes as “the casual user’s survival guide,” and there are tomes devoted to making MS Project comply with PRINCE2 and PMBOK project management principles.

Are there any books out there that have helped you understand the (software) tools that you use every day? If so, we’d love to hear about them — and then try to provide excerpts for you the reader.

In a conference call last week, Bentley CEO Greg Bentley said the release comes at a key time, as sustainability initiatives face a global bottleneck and aging infrastructures increasingly pose a risk to the public. An “intelligent infrastructure cycle,” in which participants benefit from interoperable software tools, increases the return on investment since “information reuse [is] a rule and not an exception,” Bentley said. “All of us who create infrastructure…we can keep adding value as information is reused. Information modeling is the key.”

V8i’s core capabilities can be stated as the five things that the “I” in its name stands for, said Bentley senior vice president Bhupinder Singh. These capabilities are the following:

• Intuitive design modeling, with conceptual tools for solids and surfaces and the new Luxology rendering engine;
• Interactive dynamic views, with a simplified process for creating 3D models;
• Intrinsic geo-coordination, which offers the ability to locate files in Bentley’s ProjectWise or in Google Earth;
• “Incredible” project performance, which is aided by integration with Microsoft SharePoint; and
• Interoperability, as the software can use documents from file formats such as PDF, DGN, DWG and ISO 15926. (Additional information about this functionality is available in Bentley’s Interoperability Platform White Paper.)

The V8i home page includes links to the product’s core capabilities and to user testimonials (both in print and in video).

That’s why research projects such as Leveraging Technology to Improve Construction Productivity, an effort jointly sponsored by FIATECH and the Construction Industry Institute, are so valuable. In this two-year study, Carlos Caldas looked at how automated materials tracking affected productivity at two large job sites — a 565-megawatt coal plant in Rockdale, Texas and a 550-megawatt gas plant in Toronto.

Caldas, an assistant professor of construction engineering and project management at the University of Texas at Austin, offered a summary of his study at the 2008 FIATECH Member’s Meeting. In a nutshell, the news was promising.

At the Texas plant, Bechtel was building two identical boilers, each with its own 25-acre lay-down yard. The crew building Boiler A manually collected 400 particular steel components from the lay-down yard. The Boiler B crew used RFID tagging, a GPS device and other localization technology to create maps indicating where to find the 400 steel components.

Over three months (August to October 2007), the average time spent locating steel components for Boiler A was roughly 36 minutes 48 seconds; moreover, nearly 10% of those components were not immediately found, Caldas said. For Boiler B, the average time was roughly 4 minutes 36 seconds, and only about 0.5% of components were not immediately found, he said. With more than half an hour saved per component, the total time savings for all 400 components would be nearly 215 hours.

At the Toronto plant, meanwhile, Caldas’ team tracked 224 pipe spools, 22 safety valves and 100 globe valves. The crew looking for these components manually could not immediately locate three pipe spools; two workers spent five hours searching for them, to no avail, and the contractor, SNC Lavalin, had to spend $5,000 to replace them, Caldas said. The crew using an automated process lost no components and was so efficient that the crew size was reduced from 18 to 12, he said.

In his FIATECH talk, Caldas cited CII research that had looked at the last 25 years of the construction industry and had determined that implementing technology could boost a contractor’s productivity between 0.2% and 1.5% annually, depending on the type of construction. (This compared to, among other advancements, a 1.5% annual productivity boost for additional power, say from bigger backhoes, or a 0.5% annual productivity boost for more advanced modules in concrete.) 

What, then, can we conclude from Caldas’ study? Clearly, locating parts quickly boosts productivity and, thus, lowers costs. And while there is a start-up cost associated with automated materials tracking — about $5,000 for an RFID reader and about $15 for RFID tags, plus the cost of a GPS device, Caldas said — there is going to be a start-up cost for buying a bigger backhoe or investing in new concrete modules, too. Technology, whether in the form of new software, digitizer devices or RFID tagging, should play a prominent part in your productivity plan — and your business plan.

(Editor’s note: This is the fifth in an occasional series on the ways that the construction industry can benefit from technology implementations. Previous posts in this series focused on digital photography, video conferencing, integrated systems and not getting left behind.)

• One, the user interface has been revamped to mimic Microsoft Outlook. This gives users the ability to do things such as open multiple records at the same time.
• Two, users can now sort lists by dragging and dropping column headers. There’s also a Find feature for lists and a new set of list filters, Maxwell said.
• Three, construction estimating documents such as RFIs and transmittals are now available for proposals.

You can learn more about American Contractor 8.0 over at the Maxwell Systems website.  

New features of BID2WIN 2009, product manager Kevin Flynn said in a statement, include the ability to attach documents to estimates, find/replace functionality for editing cost components and the ability to copy templates from one item database to another. (A complete list of new features in BID2WIN 2009 is available to the company’s existing customers once they log into the BID2WIN support website.)

BID2WIN’s estimating and bidding software runs on a Microsoft SQL Server database. It offers role-based security, supports offline mobile estimating (which lets estimators gather information in the field and then sync their data to BID2WIN when they return), and uses XML-based Web services to communicate with other enterprise software applications.

BID2WIN Software also makes BUILD2WIN, a browser-based field management and analysis tool. The latest version of this product, v1.1, came out in September.

Swick said a lot of the W3C’s work focuses on the idea that the Internet has evolved from a web of documents to a web of data. Here, then, we see the evolution from Web 2.0 – collaboration through blogs, social networking sites and the like — to Web 3.0, or the “semantic Web,” where data sets are linked and third parties have the ability to recognize relationships among those data sets. Web 3.0 is also poised to be ubiquitous, accessible not just from mobile devices but from everyday electronic objects, Swick said.

“Sounds cool,” you are probably saying, “but what does it all mean?” Several things, in fact.

As the mobile Web expands, the same information that project managers, engineers and other stakeholders are used to seeing on computer screens should be available on mobile devices — provided that the mobile Web initiative progresses to the point that software developers can use a single code base for desktop- and device-based browsers. Just think of the field management possibilities.

The semantic Web should make it a lot easier to share information — project plans, for example, or construction schedules — with large groups of stakeholders. Think of how easily one can post a link, photo or video for all his or her Facebook friends to see. Shouldn’t it be as easy to collaborate for business as for pleasure?

The ubiquitous Web, which stands to connects everyday objects to the Internet, has quite a bit of potential. Wouldn’t it be nice to monitor your plant’s temperature gauges from your desk, away from the heat? And how easy would material gathering be if you could combine RFID and GPS?

These are certainly exciting prospects. Clearly, though, it will take time for such technologies to first emerge and then be refined to the point that they can be used both effectively and on a scale that will benefit SMBs.

In the meantime, EPC firms, owners and vendors need to figure out what they need and how they can get it. To that end the W3C is hosting a workshop on the semantic Web in the energy industry later this year. The workshop is initially focusing on the oil and gas industries but will expand its reach in later phases. That which emerges from this workshop will be watched with much interest.

For instance, a new search mode was added to the software in order to help users quickly find specific fields, no matter the size of the database. Also, column totals were added below the part list for quick and easy access to information.

Other features of Clear Estimates 2.5 include the following:

• the ability to add different markups for material, labor, and subcontractor costs,
• a new “Part Adjuster” tool that eliminates the hassle of creating a custom part in the
  project manager,
• the ability to rearrange and customize the Parts Tools windowpane, and
• a button that can export a job as a PDF to an email message

The new version is available for download on the Clear Estimates website for a $59 a month subscription. Technical support, community forums and video tutorials are all included with a membership.

Primavera has long dominated the enterprise/capital project and program management space, from the planning and scheduling perspective, while Oracle is the leading project financials vendor….[T]he combination of the two offerings will provide one of the most viable offerings in the PBS [project-based solutions] market.

The Primavera acquisition brings Oracle into project-based businesses such as the AEC industry. That, combined with Oracle’s “deep roots in the IT enterprise,” both in terms of financial software and in terms of middleware, brings about an offering known as enterprise PPM, which the analysts say “will make it difficult for other PPM [project portfolio management] vendors to crack into enterprise deals.”

And that, in turn, could prompt other vendors of project-based solutions, including Deltek and Meridian Systems, to consider a move into asset, program and/or project portfolio management, Visitacion and Wang add. (If that is the case, then the construction software consolidation we halfheartedly foretold a little less than two months ago very well may give way to larger-scale, industry-wide software consolidation.)

Of course, little will matter if the Oracle-Primavera deal doesn’t live up to expectations. It should work, but the Forrester analysts point to two real challenges for the firms. One, they need to make sure that Oracle and Primavera applications integrate without overwhelming end users with lengthy processes. Two, Oracle needs to come up with a solution that will make SMBs happy — otherwise, Visitacion and Wang surmise, those SMBs will stick to less expensive Web-based or general purpose project management software. (Blogger Dylan Wan, reflecting on the deal, puts in a plug for Web-based project analytics as well.)

The Oracle-Primavera deal should be finalized by the end of the year. Once that happens, things will start to get interesting. Watch this space.

Walmsley admits that it took weeks to transcribe his four-hour conversation with Walker — one that covered a variety of topics, from the history of Autodesk to the decision to use LISP as the programming language. Walmsley was also gracious enough to break down the 18,000-word transcript into the following four sections:

• Part 1: Autodesk’s early history — This section covers the genesis of AutoDesk. Apparently, it started with a handful of mainframe programmers who ended up moonlighting on a few side projects.  Eventually, with a little luck, these projects gained a massive following in the early 1980s. Suddenly, the small startup company grew into a software behemoth.

• Part 2: AutoCAD’s architecture & APIs — In this part, Walker explains how LISP and AutoLISP became the muscle behind AutoCAD. They also discuss some of the add-ons and features that were deployed over time, as the program gained more notoriety.

• Part 3: Autodesk’s eco-system and strategy — In this next segment, Walmsley and Walker talk about Autodesk’s business model and how outside influences helped the company gain market share.

• Part 4: Past and future opportunities — Finally, the two discuss Autodesk’s acquisitions of other companies, failed product launches and the future of the firm.

So, if you’ve been searching for an exhaustive take on Autodesk and the origins of CAD, look no further. Walmsley offers a raw, barely-edited interview with a developer who changed the construction industry. If you can handle the length, this piece will provide a lot of insight into the past, present and future of CAD software.

(Note: A special thanks to Shaan Hurley from Between the Lines, who pointed out this four-part series to us.)