See the top rated post in this thread. Click here

View Poll Results: Would you recommend Revit for facilities management?

Voters
15. You may not vote on this poll
  • Using Revit currently for FM

    9 60.00%
  • Helped client implement Revit for FM

    6 40.00%
Results 1 to 10 of 10

Thread: Revit ready for Facilities Management?

  1. #1
    Member Lansing's Avatar
    Join Date
    2003-12
    Location
    Austin, Texas
    Posts
    4
    Login to Give a bone
    0

    Default

    I'm looking for recommendations on using Revit for facilities management. I have been contacted by two firms with very small FM departments considering getting CAD. We typically recommend AutoCAD or ADT or Map and sometimes an add-on called FaciliCAD.

    Revit looks to me like an even better candidate for certain situations. Anyone out there have any comments?

    Thanks!

    Lansing

  2. #2
    Revit Guru gregcashen's Avatar
    Join Date
    2003-05
    Location
    Emeryville, CA
    Posts
    1,352
    Login to Give a bone
    0

    Default Re: Revit ready for Facilities Management?

    You will want to talk to Jeffrey McGrew, who is an active poster here and used to do a lot of FM for a big architecture firm in SF. He is now an applications engineer for a reseller, and a wealth of knowledge, especially about FM and rendering.

  3. #3
    Active Member
    Join Date
    2003-07
    Location
    Bethesda, MD
    Posts
    92
    Login to Give a bone
    0

    Default Re: Revit ready for Facilities Management?

    Our firm has done some facilities management with Revit (not me personally) What is it that you wanted to know?

  4. #4
    All AUGI, all the time jbalding48677's Avatar
    Join Date
    2003-05
    Location
    Irvine, CA
    Posts
    765
    Login to Give a bone
    0

    Default Re: Revit ready for Facilities Management?

    What types of tasks are you looking to accomplish? I have used Revit (on a trial basis) to do some minor management of our office.
    - JB

  5. #5
    AUGI Addict aggockel50321's Avatar
    Join Date
    2003-05
    Location
    Waterville, Maine
    Posts
    1,748
    Login to Give a bone
    0

    Default Re: Revit ready for Facilities Management?

    We use it here for that purpose.

    Presently we have about 38 out of approx 40 buildings set up in Revit. It's a great tool for tracking & doing small renovations.

    Where it really comes in handy is when someone will come in & want quanities or areas of floors, walls, windows, etc.

    On renovation work, we use it extensively for doing "what if" type design development, before turning the project over to a consultant.

    I also tend to use revit for a lot of stuff it was not designed to do, but does a great job, i.e. acad drawing viewer & printer, dwg to pdf converter, superbowl football pool chart, NASCAR redneck pool, etc.

    We also used it to convert a Sol LeWitt (NY artist) donated scupture sketch into working drawings to get it built. http://www.colby.edu/museum/exhibits/020627sl.html


    I just got handed a project where we have to identify & tally up all the asbestos floor tile in our buildings.

    For this one, the approach I'm taking is to set up levels at 10' intervals, giving each one the name of a building. I then import the 2d floor plans (usually 2-4 floors) onto each level, apply room separation lines around the asbestos floor areas, plunk in a room tag, & have the room schedule sort & total areas by level (building). I'm then using callouts to set up the sheets showing the areas. It's working great.-

  6. #6
    I could stop if I wanted to Tom Dorner's Avatar
    Join Date
    2003-11
    Location
    Phoenix, AZ
    Posts
    371
    Login to Give a bone
    0

    Default Re: Revit ready for Facilities Management?

    We use Revit for lease management and area calculations for a property management firm and it is working fine.

    From a FM department's perspective, Revit may or may not work. I used to be the the FM manager at a couple of major corporations and used FM:Systems and Archibus which both are a little more robust when it comes to things like move management, online submittal of service requests, tracking service history of equipment, posting of the entire portfolio of real estate in an EIS format etc.

    Having said that, if all you want to do is keep accurate models of your buildings and track areas and lease expirations Revit works great. The only downside is that I cannot do a report that spans mutiple Revit files, so each building/model needs to stand on its own with respect to area and leasing reports. (The Revit reports can be exported to Excel and rolled up, but not an elegant solution)

    Maybe an API would allow the FM:Systems/Archibus's of the world to bring their vast FM capabilities to work with Revit.

    Hope this helps.

    Tom

  7. #7
    AUGI Addict hand471037's Avatar
    Join Date
    2003-05
    Location
    Oakland, California
    Posts
    1,934
    Login to Give a bone
    0

    Default Re: Revit ready for Facilities Management?

    Having said that, if all you want to do is keep accurate models of your buildings and track areas and lease expirations Revit works great. The only downside is that I cannot do a report that spans mutiple Revit files, so each building/model needs to stand on its own with respect to area and leasing reports. (The Revit reports can be exported to Excel and rolled up, but not an elegant solution)
    Actually, where I used to work we developed a method to do this via the ODBC exporting. If you export multipule Revit models to the same predefined ODBC file they won't over-right each other and will allow for multi-building querys. Again, not an automatic solution, but a touch better than having to roll the Excel sheets together. Also you can write Excel spreadsheets that 'x-ref' other spreadsheets, so that you wouldn't need to do anything by hand, other than the export from Revit.

    Revit excells as a Information Management tool. In some ways it's even better than the existing FM solutions out there, for everything is always linked & live, and you can trust your dataset. With certain other FM applications it's not so bidirectional, syncing is more manual, takes much more setup, and if the drawings get out of sync with the database you're in a lot of trouble, for now you can't trust either dataset. This never happens with Revit and the set up is very minimal and doesn't require any programing or database knowlege. Working with Revit for FM is more simular to Apature than to Archibus, in that you can simply import your existing DWG files and define your suites over them rather than recreating your buildings within Revit in whole. Revit also understand BOMA standards out of the box.

    Revit is not however made for FM. You can certainly leverage Revit's bidirectional data model & it's built-in relational database to track any information you want about a building. However, like the post above states, a dedicated FM solution is going to have better toolsets for FM specific items, like move management and the like. However, Revit is easyer to use, useful for more things, and way cheaper than something like Apature. So look at your needs first, and decide if you might be willing to give up some FM-specific features to gain a faster, better, and easyer to use system that requires less setup. You might find that Revit will be the cheaper and better solution!

    I'm writting up a proposal to teach a class on this subject for next year's AU. keeping fingers crossed! But call me with any questions you might have: 415-593-6000 Ext. 129

  8. #8
    I could stop if I wanted to Clyne Curtis's Avatar
    Join Date
    2003-05
    Location
    Provo, Utah
    Posts
    208
    Login to Give a bone
    0

    Default Re: Revit ready for Facilities Management?

    What a timely topic! I currently manage a database of over 200 buildings in AutoCAD, and am trying to convince the powers that it would be of great benefit to have them all in Revit. I primarily maintain the plans in order to provide accurate areas and up-to-date floor plans for our Planning Department architechtural staff's constant remodeling projects. Sounds to me like this would be just the ticket for me!
    Right now I take the re-design data and basically cut and paste the information into my database drawings. I envision in the future haveing the designers check out worksets of the original model and then saving them back to central when the project is completed. This would save me a lot of time!
    Does this sound like a possible use of Revit? I am interested in all opinions.
    Jeffrey, I hope they accept your proposal, I will definitely attend that class!

    Clyne
    CAD Mangler
    Brigham Young University

  9. #9
    Member
    Join Date
    2007-01
    Posts
    23
    Login to Give a bone
    0

    Default Re: Revit ready for Facilities Management?

    I'm currently using Tririga Facility Center 7.3. This is a CAFM software. Actualy we are only using the space module for property portfolio, occupancy, space management and clasification. The final product of this information is BOMA rentable areas, corporate units alocations, Sqft area for insurances, vacancy and usage reports. Althoug it has capabilities to locate assets at any room, we are not using it because management dont think is a indispensable benefit. Facility Center also provides with Space Planning and a Stacking module, but the planning department does not see the value on this. They say that the bottom line is, that they always need to go to the field to chek on actual and existing conditions. It is a lot of workstation data and head count and they do not have the resourses to go with it now or in the future. When I ask for the furuture, it gets enven worth. Other thing we are not using is the move management module. So..We are paying 20k+ dollars (Annual license fee) for something that is too powerfull for what we really "need" and I say "need" because that's the official position but, it is not mine. Now the corporation is implementing SAP/ERP (Enterprice Resourse Management). This ERP solution offers leas contract management, equipment and supplys managemnt, work orders, leas contract management, and space and property portfolio. The issue I have is that it doesn't integrate with CAD. The only way is through a FM software. I do not want to pay 20k anymore for my actual CAFM if I only going to use it for space alocations. But at the same time, the way it is structured, allows me to make changes in the CAD file, syncronize, and then I obtain a nice BOMA custome made report. That way I have CAD files that match the report product. Can I use Revit as my only space allocation tool? Would it be aeasier to pass my actual DWG files to Revit? Does Revit alows ODBC comunication with other DB aplications? What about FMDesktop? Can I use FM Desktop to feed the SAP/ERP DB? Should my SAP consultant provide a way to communicate SAP with FmDesktop and Revit or ADT?

  10. #10
    Member
    Join Date
    2008-01
    Posts
    5
    Login to Give a bone
    1

    Wink Re: Revit ready for Facilities Management?

    Wow, this is definitely overkil... Using Tririga only for BOMA calculations. For that $20k annual maintenance fee, you could buy all the FMDesktop software you need twice. And you would be able to work with Revit, AutoCAD Architecture, or plain AutoCAD. Space and occupancy reporting is FMDesktop's strongest point. And doing an integration to move those area allocations to SAP is pretty straightforward since FMDesktop has an Access database.


    Quote Originally Posted by musico20002000 View Post
    I'm currently using Tririga Facility Center 7.3. This is a CAFM software. Actualy we are only using the space module for property portfolio, occupancy, space management and clasification. The final product of this information is BOMA rentable areas, corporate units alocations, Sqft area for insurances, vacancy and usage reports. Althoug it has capabilities to locate assets at any room, we are not using it because management dont think is a indispensable benefit. Facility Center also provides with Space Planning and a Stacking module, but the planning department does not see the value on this. They say that the bottom line is, that they always need to go to the field to chek on actual and existing conditions. It is a lot of workstation data and head count and they do not have the resourses to go with it now or in the future. When I ask for the furuture, it gets enven worth. Other thing we are not using is the move management module. So..We are paying 20k+ dollars (Annual license fee) for something that is too powerfull for what we really "need" and I say "need" because that's the official position but, it is not mine. Now the corporation is implementing SAP/ERP (Enterprice Resourse Management). This ERP solution offers leas contract management, equipment and supplys managemnt, work orders, leas contract management, and space and property portfolio. The issue I have is that it doesn't integrate with CAD. The only way is through a FM software. I do not want to pay 20k anymore for my actual CAFM if I only going to use it for space alocations. But at the same time, the way it is structured, allows me to make changes in the CAD file, syncronize, and then I obtain a nice BOMA custome made report. That way I have CAD files that match the report product. Can I use Revit as my only space allocation tool? Would it be aeasier to pass my actual DWG files to Revit? Does Revit alows ODBC comunication with other DB aplications? What about FMDesktop? Can I use FM Desktop to feed the SAP/ERP DB? Should my SAP consultant provide a way to communicate SAP with FmDesktop and Revit or ADT?

Similar Threads

  1. Facilities Management and Revit
    By nateouren in forum Facilities Management In Practice
    Replies: 3
    Last Post: 2012-01-12, 06:09 PM
  2. Facilities Management and Revit
    By ajayholland in forum Facilities Management In Practice
    Replies: 2
    Last Post: 2010-01-06, 10:02 AM
  3. Revit and Facilities Management
    By brethomp in forum Revit Architecture - General
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 2009-08-31, 04:55 PM
  4. Facilities Management with Revit
    By Clyne Curtis in forum Facilities Management In Practice
    Replies: 12
    Last Post: 2005-10-26, 12:25 PM
  5. Revit ready for Facilities Management?
    By Lansing in forum Revit - In Practice
    Replies: 7
    Last Post: 2004-03-20, 04:38 AM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •