Trust but verify. It’s a time-honored treaty enforcement principle. It also works well as a basic mantra for BIM (building information modeling)-based building construction. Just ask the Virtual Design & Construction (VDC) Team at Gilbane, a family-owned and operated construction company. Armed with a phase-shift laser scanner, a Gilbane VDC engineering team recently documented measurement discrepancies on a high-profile building construction project.
Gilbane specializes in the high-wire world of at-risk construction. On occasion, Gilbane is called in to rescue troubled projects. Recently the Gilbane VDC team was summoned to do just that. John Tocci, Jr., Director of the VDC Team sets the stage: “The work involves a new corporate campus, the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company. For various reasons, the previous construction manager was terminated. That happened on a Friday. My team took over the job on Saturday. By Sunday afternoon we were laser scanning part of the project in order to reconcile measurements for Monday morning meetings.”
Trade contractors desperately needed reliable benchmarks to accurately set walls, ducts, pipe, conduit locations, and other assemblies. Then there was the elevator shaft. Laser scanning verified two-inch variations on all sides, with the elevator opening three inches smaller than it should be. There was a new sheriff in town and the trades eventually rallied to the Gilbane VDC team.
A point cloud of modeled as-built conditions.
“We’ve had a number of cases where the field team, trade contractors, or architects have argued with us about dimensions of existing conditions, Tocci stated. “We’ve been right every time. It underscores the fact that BIM and VDC, no matter how established we think it is, is still an emerging technology.”
As Gilbane discovered the anecdotal side of laser scanning pales in comparison to the dramatic ROI story. “Our first laser scanner paid for itself in the first week of operation,” Tocci reports. “We conservatively calculate we saved about $150,000 on the first project we scanned.” Just one week? Understandably, that kind of near-instant payback may strike some as too good to be true. Believe it, says Tocci. “If anyone wants to reverse engineer the calculations, they’ll quickly see the payback was actually quite larger,” Tocci reports.
“We assigned super-conservative values to all the ordinary construction tasks that scanning eliminates. We factor-in the electrical, mechanical, and plumbing packages on the job. “One week understates it. With scanning, there are no back charges. No finger pointing. No remediation. It’s all because it was measured right the first time,” Tocci says.
Like many risk-adverse businesses, Gilbane takes a careful, deliberate path to integrating new technology into their business. “The Focus3D Laser Scanner changed the industry,” Tocci declares. “When it came out it was three times less expensive than its competitors. Instead of capturing a single point at once, it can capture 978 million points per second. That’s a radically different scenario. It’s so easy for one person to move it around. It captures levels of detail that you didn’t think it could. “It’s an amazing tool. We now verify and find discrepancies that might bite us later on. All that risk goes away. We couldn’t be happier or more impressed,” Tocci says.
More Information:
FARO Technologies
250 Technology Park
Lake Mary, FL 32746
Phone: 407-333-9911 | Fax: 407-333-4181
aec.faro.com
Related Stories
| Aug 11, 2010
Wisconsin becomes the first state to require BIM on public projects
As of July 1, the Wisconsin Division of State Facilities will require all state projects with a total budget of $5 million or more and all new construction with a budget of $2.5 million or more to have their designs begin with a Building Information Model. The new guidelines and standards require A/E services in a design-bid-build project delivery format to use BIM and 3D software from initial ...
| Aug 11, 2010
News Briefs: GBCI begins testing for new LEED professional credentials... Architects rank durability over 'green' in product attributes... ABI falls slightly in April, but shows market improvement
News Briefs: GBCI begins testing for new LEED professional credentials... Architects rank durability over 'green' in product attributes... ABI falls slightly in April, but shows market improvement
| Aug 11, 2010
Luxury Hotel required faceted design
Goettsch Partners, Chicago, designed a new five-star, 214-room hotel for the King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The design-build project, with Saudi Oger Ltd. as contractor and Rayadah Investment Co. as developer, has a three-story podium supporting a 17-story glass tower with a nine-story opening that allows light to penetrate the mass of the building.
| Aug 11, 2010
Architectural Visualization Rendering the Future
Three-dimensional design tools have revolutionized the way architects and engineers design buildings; in recent years, parametric modeling has enabled Building Teams to impart weight tolerances and other intelligent information to a finished design. Yet many designers say they use 3D most in the conceptual design stage, when detailed building information is not necessary and can actually encumb...
| Aug 11, 2010
Big-time BIM
As the need for new state, county, and municipal facilities keeps growing and funding for public building construction continues to shrink, state and local officials are left with two basic options: renovate dilapidated older buildings and hope for the best, or build new facilities on anemic budgets.
| Aug 11, 2010
Dotting the I in IPD
Collaboration software is going beyond just sharing files. It is being used to enable full building information modeling early in design. Two programs are enabling Building Teams to more easily share the information in BIM and use it for integrated project delivery: Bluebeam Software, which just released the newest version of its AEC-specific PDF collaboration tool; and eBuilder Enterprise, a W...
| Aug 11, 2010
Great Solutions: Business Management
22. Commercial Properties Repositioned for University USE Tocci Building Companies is finding success in repositioning commercial properties for university use, and it expects the trend to continue. The firm's Capital Cove project in Providence, R.I., for instance, was originally designed by Elkus Manfredi (with design continued by HDS Architects) to be a mixed-use complex with private, market-...
| Aug 11, 2010
BIM adoption tops 80% among the nation's largest AEC firms, according to BD+C's Giants 300 survey
The nation's largest architecture, engineering, and construction companies are on the BIM bandwagon in a big way, according to Building Design+Construction's premier Top 50 BIM Adopters ranking, published as part of the 2009 Giants 300 survey. Of the 320 AEC firms that participated in Giants survey, 83% report having at least one BIM seat license in house, half have more than 30 seats, and near...
| Aug 11, 2010
Thrown For a Loop in China
While the Bird's Nest and Water Cube captured all the TV coverage during the Beijing Olympics in August, the Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV Headquarters in Beijing—known as the “Drunken Towers” or “Big Shorts,” for its unusual shape—is certain to steal the show when it opens next year.