Robert Bird Group increases design productivity with Autodesk Revit Architecture

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15 Aug 2012

Leading structural and civil engineering firm adopts BIM to add value to its high-end business.

Autodesk, a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software, announced today that The Robert Bird Group, a consulting structural and civil engineering firm, has fully implemented building information modeling (BIM) into their high-end engineering practice by using Autodesk Revit Architecture software.

The company had been using AutoCAD successfully for many years, but needed to speed up design and drafting time in order to decrease time to market, without producing more errors in the process, increasing work rate or reducing the required quality of the final documentation.

Working closely with Autodesk partner Omnix International, Robert Bird decided to adopt Autodesk Revit Structure, Autodesk's purpose-built solution for BIM. This meant a significant shift to BIM for the firm that would allow their engineers and designers to capture and analyse concepts, whilst maintaining their vision through design and documentation to construction. As the roles of architects, engineers and designers in the building process are changing with the increasingly global and complex nature of design, engineering and construction, it has become even more important to keep information co-ordinated, up-to-date and accessible in an integrated digital environment, giving architects, engineers, builders and owners a clear overall vision of all their projects, as well as aiding their ability to make better decisions faster. At the core of the Revit platform, a powerful parametric change engine automatically helps co-ordinate all changes across design, documentation and analyses.

“Once we adopted the Revit platform, we decreased our drafting time due to the parametric nature of the Revit platform,” said Anthony Doyle, MENA Drafting Manager (Structural) at the Robert Bird Group. “We have reduced the number of general drafting errors and any changes made are reflected throughout the project. Changes in our workflow have been very promising. Autodesk solutions continue to aid us in providing a quality product for our clients as well as helping keep us at the leading edge in our industry.”

As the Revit platform is highly customizable, design visualisation and conceptualisation tools built on top of Revit to give users the flexibility to optimise and improve their designs before they are built, which saves time and money, improves quality and fosters innovation. The Robert Bird Group was able to import their local CAD standards into the Revit platform and then adapted them as required. As Revit was used increasingly as the main design tool, the company saw a major benefit in time saving with project documentation as well as the ability of staff to visualise the structure prior to issuing documentation.

The 3D view aspects of the Revit platform have allowed the team at Robert Bird to ensure that complex details are understood more clearly. As Doyle explains, “We can extract more useful information out of projects as they cease to be 2D line elements in plan or section. Instead, they’re virtual building models and this has helped with understanding initial quantities of elements as well as aiding in early detection of areas that may have issues with head heights. While modelling these areas, the problems become more visible more quickly than with 2D CAD.”

“Our design suites help meet the demand for BIM by providing our customers with access to a broad set of tools that support projects from conception to construction,” said Louay Dahmash, Territory Sales Director , Middle East & Africa. Autodesk. “Autodesk Revit Architecture software offers our customers a variety of visualization enhancements to provide more control over the appearance of projects within the software”