Improving the process on BIG projects

[pauljordan]

A little background first.

We have a multiple facility project, lots of process piping, all disciplines working for same company from Archies to Fire Protection. All of it is done in house.

All computers are fairly new, running 12gb of ram in each one, dual monitors, 64 bit, 2011 software, everything from Autocad - Revit Structure - NavisWorks.

Here in lies the problem(s)... Load times on the files are VERY long, crashing Autocad MEP a lot of times. Plotting times are excruciatingly painful.

Currently, I see a practice of users loading upwards of 50 xrefs per drawing in order to work on thier designs. The xrefs are from all disciplines and all levels of the job. Usually they're building specific so they're not loading in other buildings or anything.

I've made a few suggestions and I just want to bounce them off the group here.

1. Load only what you can not move. If you're doing cable trays for electrical, load the archie and the structural drawings and go about your business. If you need to see what the other trades are doing, run your NavisWorks Simulate and open them all in there. Have Autocad MEP on one monitor, NavisWorks on the other.

2. For the plotting pains, use older computers that have been cleaned up and run your plots on them. This frees up your design computer and allows you to get back to work.

3. Our Architecture and Structural models are created in Revit Arch and Struc and saved back to Autocad versions. I'm looking for the best ideas on making these files as usable as I can get them, fast too.

Your inputs and thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[Craig_L]

Typically, I don't deal with projects so big that this is an issue,
but I just this morning read an article on this so you might also find it interesting
hope this helps

http://www.aecbytes.com/tipsandtricks/2011/issue57-newforma.html

[pauljordan]

Interesting find Karalon10. Kind of reminds me of the seldom utilized Drawing Compare in Autocad Architecture and I think they even have it for Autocad MEP.

The projects I'm working on have all my MEP folks using Autocad MEP, my structural folks using Revit Structure, and my Archies using Revit Architecture.

Navisworks is great for any kind of coordination we need between the engineering and architectural folks. The contractors are using Navisworks as well once they start doing thier fabrication drawings.

I'm mainly looking for lessons learned on big projects from some of the users on here.

Maybe I'll just keep good notes of the happenings and then write a course for AU this year to share the pain points with others.

[dgorsman]

We have similar problems, where users complain of slowness as they try to work with the entire facility loaded. Its difficult to convince users they don't need every single XREF to be loaded which is compounded by piping/civil/electrical splitting their models at different locations (or even at all). Its taken several years to get everybody on board with the concept of actually organizing XREFs in the first place.

Getting everybody to stop "doing their own thing" and follow a single coorindated standard is one of the great hurdles when dealing with different discipline groups that each have their own needs.

[pauljordan]

One of the biggest issues I've seen lately is layers getting changed on the Autocad side of things. See, there are a lot of background routines being run every night that go in and create our xrefs. I'm thinking I need to go have a look see and find out what exactly is happening and getting a handle on it.

I've seen this problem when working with multiple offices within the same company but, here's we're all in (BIG) happy office.. I'm due to move to another office on Monday and will take most of this knowledge as standards with me to incorporate into an even larger scale project. Basically, the problems I'm seeing now will be tripled soon.

Currently we're pounding away on Rules, Batch sets, and selection sets in Navisworks and exporting them so we can make all the different buildings use the same kind of information. Lots of fun to be had there. I was able to get them to open the .dwg files instead of messing with the .NWD's that were being created. That way, during a coordination meeting, a change can be made and saved in Autocad and you can refresh just that drawing in your NWF and see the changes almost instantaneously.

Which reminds me, I need to go visit the NavisWorks Wish List forum. Need to be able to sort rules and also export and import rules and batch sets into and out of Excel. It'll definitely make life easier to handle.

[tabest]

Not going to be able to help you much on the CAD side, but on the Revit side, consider in the future separating your sheets from your model. In doing so you make modeling faster, because you don't have all the overhead of tags, etc. With 2011 + you can tag linked model elements, thus it becomes a feasible solution. This also has the advantage that upon the starting of a new project on this same building, you dont have to remove all the sheets to start the new project, just add the new phase of construction, create your sheet file, and link in your model, and now you are ready to go.

I've used the sheets in seperate file since 2009 to solve our similar issues, and even to more extent on a million square foot project where we had to break it apart as such.

Hope this helps