Budgets

[J-G]

I am working on the office budget and I was hoping that those of you with more experience with Revit can help. The question I have is how much time you find yourself on non billible configuration...basically CAD management issues. General families and tweaking. When ever a company switches CAD platforms there is quite a bit of time associated with initial configuration, and since we haven't done many projects with Revit (still making the switch from ADT) it is hard to project how much time will be required past the initial phase.

Basically I am asking this: do you find that you can bill the majority of your drafting time directly to the Owner? And, if you could estimate it how much has your productivity increased with Revit? If it was taking XX hours with ADT, will Revit require a much smaller % XX in the future?

What is the actualy productivty gain we are looking at?

Also if any of you have some general estimates that you have done on yearly costs for office software and hardware (per user) I would be thankful! :)

[beegee]

Jon,

Thats virtually impossible to answer. Every office will have different answers for you. It depends on the size of office, the type of work being done ( repeatable Vs custom ), the clients and their expectations, the project size and the construction methodology, plus myriads of other things.

Personally, I think there is absolutely no doubt that Revit is faster ( more efficient to produce drawings ) than anything I can think of. The caveat is that _ work expands to occupy the time available. :roll: That is to say, I find I'm spending time on things that I previously didn't have the time to do within a project. Things like- more time on design, more time rendering ( experimenting with view, textures and techniques ) even drawing more sections ( because I can and they all help )

Ok, I know that doesn't help you much. You're looking at benchmarking productivity. Firstly go to the AIA , or similar, see if they have done any productivity surveys that can steer you in the right direction. Compare these with the documented ( ie actual, not notional ) results of your firm to see where you sit in relation to that.
Then get your most experienced guy to do a small project in Revit and compare that to the time he would have taken in ADT or whatever. You'll then need to factor in for his learning curve with Revit. That's really difficult to estmate, I know, but if you can, then you're on the way to answering your question. As a rule of thumb, I would expect that the average user would be about 30% faster in Revit after continuous use for a month or two. Note, I'm comparing Revit with Revit here, not revit with XYZ. Anyone else care to comment on that seat of the pants figure ?

There, that was too easy wasn't it . :lol:


beegee

[J-G]

Okay...I know it isn't easy :wink: , thank you for the response. I am convinced that we will be doing much better work and faster work with Revit, becasue I have been working with it on smaller projects. The problem is of course that the first 2 or 3 projects have a lot of overhead which shouldn't be associated with future projects. The first go around...and still for me...I find myself tweaking the display of documentation and creating new families, so the actual hours are of course off the mark if I compare what it would take me to do the same project in ADT. Somtimes I find I spend a little more time trying to get everything "smart" becasue Revit has that ability; whereas before I wouldn't have even worried about it becasue it wasn't an option.

I can also add a little background detail. We do high end, complex residential work. My last full blown project in ADT was a little above the 8,000 sqft mark, on a sloped lot, 3 levels, with the lower level consisting of mostly retaining walls. Our design are period styles, but every house is completely differrent and requires new details. They have a lot of detail and nuances which most firms would not be dealing with. One slight fear I have is on the time that will be used creating custom families that we would have just drawn 2d before. Of course simular families should be able to be modified easily for new details.

General responses do help. Although I can't expect someone to hand me a budget or solid figure on productivity gains, getting a general response can help at convincing my boss that this program is going to be different...he is a design only "how do you turn the computer on" type of guy, and needs a little push to back up my figures. Unfortunatly I had promised quite a bit with ADT and the time we invested in the program never really paid us back...not much of that is transferable :cry:

[Steve_Stafford]

Jon,

I think that the mgmt issues will focus on training, worksets and families...there is hardly any of the desktop config stuff like other platforms. Install, copy in a master Revit.ini file, change the user initials, done.

I have been pushing along a few projects here and virtually all my time is "billable". Even as slow as I might be on given tasks, compared to doing it in 2D...I'm still faster.

One other mgmt issue, sharing work with engineering...if you're all in one building, it's a much bigger task. If they are outside, you might/can get away with generic exports without the added tweaking to make the trades happy with your drawings. Then again, if you have a great working relationship with your supporting engineers you may already go to greater lengths to give them pre-set drawings.

I do think building really good families will chew up a great deal of someone's time. I personally hope to groom a user that likes making that sort of stuff, it takes care and understanding to make a family that really works, is versatile and self annotates. I've only had to create a couple dozen families of our own so far. But the more you use other peoples families, you find the inadequacies. Roof ladders on RUGI are an example, try to flex them and they fly apart. (no assault on the creator intended...I was glad they were there to work with)

I do wrestle with the draft 2D versus modeling, how intense do you make a window family, bury detail components and such? Will I end up using a different window? It's a public job so I can draw such but get such else? A symbol and a note can be just as effective. The rule of thumb I've been using is if I'm expected to produce any other view beside the primary one, then it makes sense to create it. I have also just used a 3D box and painted 2D detail on it for cabinets to do something "quick" when it was a design that I didn't have time to do a real family for.

overanout

[sbrown]

This is my best answer, some people will make you tons of money using revit. I have produced projects in revit with 300hours left to spend on them as compared to what the same size project would have taken 4 autocad/softdesk users. Great right, ok then you put 3 guys using worksets on a small house an you lose your shirt due to bugs and user error. If you can get everyone trained and all of your projects were the optimum revit type(in my belief that is a core and shell office bldg.) you would save tremendous amounts of time and money and almost all your time would be billable. Now try a custom 2 million dollar home on revit and I guarenteee you will loose twice your fee in the cost of creation of custom windows, custom cabinets, custom doors, etc. the owner will be so excited to see everything, every room in 3d that unless you have a client willing to pay you to create all those renderings you will loose lots of money. Houses are the worst revit project in my opinion. You just need to be aware that what you used to do(ie a builders set) becomes so much more with revit because its possible to give so much more the owners see that and want it but don't want to pay more than they would have paid for the "builders set" You just must be very careful in you use of revit.

We get lots of jobs because we use revit and we sell our clients on the great visualization of their building, but this can come at a great cost.

Revit + commercial projects = $$$$ in our office
Revit + condo/residential= Oh my how did we spend so much time on that door family, but isn't this cool. Happy client poor architect.

[GS Fulton]

I also do high end, complex residential work. I have the most trouble not with families (not too bad once you get the hang of it) but with wall joins and handling multi levels on a sloping site. The site stuff is problematic when you want to move the house. Once you have cut up the site for the house, it will not be parametric with the house. I usually delete the site, re-import, and redo the work. Not too slick. Anybody got a better way?

Rectilinear projects are cake for Revit. I just finished a 5,200 SF home on a sloping site and it was pretty much square corners. Did ok on that one. I'm currently working on a complex 8K+ home on a really sloping site and I'm spending a lot of time on it. That's partially a function of the clients (lots of changes) I would suggest maybe if you currently design with sketch paper to get the design finalized prior to modeling it in Revit. This goes against the idea that Revit makes presentation rendering easier. You've gotta build the model to make the rendering.

If you look at the way most of us have worked in the past, Schematic and Design development usually was a smaller percentage of project fee than Contract Documents. What happens is that gets somewhat reversed in Revit because of the modeling that happens before you get to CD's. It's GREAT once you get the model done. I find the 2D tools awesome once you get used to them. The drawings are very organized and you don't have to worry with layers and the stuff you're used to. I'm still wrestling with the transferance of time into DDD from CD phase. Anybody else?

One last thing, for now, I'm sure I'll come up with more, be very careful with area calculations. If you select the room tag it will show the area it is calculating. It's not always what you expect. Just make sure it is. Takes some tweaking sometimes. Area calculations are based on the BOMA standard methods of measuring and do not necessarily reflect the way a lot of people would calculate a residence. I recommend doing the area calculation by hand so you can see exactly what you get compared with what you want.

If you want to see some files, email me and I'll send them or post them here. Good luck