Construction project software from Bluebeam has helped a contractor renovate an historic stone building near London’s Piccadilly Circus.
According to Bluebeam, UK-based Forcia turned to Bluebeam Revu collaborative project software in particular because the project left little room for error.
Terry Crawford, director of construction at Forcia, revealed that Revu is basically set up on every desktop, on every side computer.
“It’s fully immersed in our business,” Crawford said. “We’re starting to see the power of it coming back to us from the design teams, the client’s side.”
The challenge at was to remove a load-bearing column in the middle of an entrance to open up the interior arcade to foot traffic, without disrupting users of eight storeys of offices above.
The owners felt that the column obstructed the interior and dissuaded potential shoppers, according to Bluebeam’s write-up of the year-long project.
Forcia used Bluebeam Revu to iterate their plan, collaborating on a transfer of the load to a horizontal steel beam, helping engineers, architects, builders and owners work together on complicated drawings while pinpointing related risks.
“Our clients don’t realise that it’s not a coincidence we can run our projects as well as we do – and I believe that Revu is very much a partner in that process,” Crawford said.
“You need something to be able to collaborate, to figure out what the challenges are.”
Revu’s markup capabilities also ensured that all their ideas could be represented in their drawings and images, in addition making teams adept at takeoffs, RFIs, overlays, snapshots and document reviews.
Snapshotting eases the editing process, enabling architects to quickly “manipulate” drawings, highlighting, overlaying, and deleting parts of a design as required.
“It’s important to have a very useful piece of kit to make that explanation as simple as possible, because you have to get the buy-in of many parties; both technical and commercial, right through to the top of the client tree,” said Crawford.
( Image by Foundry Co from Pixabay )
