Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part series on some of the construction technology on display at the October 2015 BIMForum in Orlando, Fla. The post focused on Fieldlens, the second on NoteVault.
Cloud-hosted Viewpoint construction software are collaborative project management tools. Its Viewpoint for Projects lets members of project teams use a browser to access a project’s documents, data and drawings. They can do overlays; identify risks; assign, track, and manage tasks; pull up Revit specs; walk through models; and coordinate and update info and access all the data in a central repository where it’s reasonably easy to find exactly what you’re looking for, according to Rob Humphreys, Viewpoint’s vice president of global product management.
In short, a designated person at your company sets up the portal – similar to a network drive that’s easily accessible. Users – including contractors, architects, engineers, subcontractors, suppliers and owners – are then designated and their access levels created. Projects are entered and containers for submittals, pending change orders, schedules, plans and specs, punch lists, daily reports, BIM and more created.
Project managers can build workflows and then template them, making consistency among projects more possible, enhancing efficiency and accuracy and making bottlenecks easier to see and mitigate.
There are two interesting pieces to note.
The portal administrator can set it up so that if someone working on the project is not using Viewpoint and sends a project-related e-mail, that can automatically be routed into the portal into the appropriate container – meaning, as Humphrey’s says, that collaboration is enhanced – “even if they subs don’t know they’re collaborating with us.”
And, you know that commercial project you just finished? The one where you handed off pallets of boxes of spreadsheets, data, drawings and maintenance manuals? That handoff can be now be more complete because Viewpoint incorporates COBie and pulls all Industry Foundation Classes , or IFCs, into it, so installers can enter serial numbers and warranty info related to the major equipment in the building. A facility manager can then import all of it into a COBie-compliant FM system, saving inordinate amounts of man-hours going through all the paper products.
There are tangible benefits, Humphreys notes. He explains that Viewpoint provides:
- a centralized repository with the latest version of the drawings
- an audit history and who looked at what documents
- standardizes processes
- quickens closeouts
- easy report creation
- an e-discovery tool for attorneys in the event of disputes