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BuildUp scales offsite construction with Agacad and ARKANCE Systems support

Be.Smart Metal Framing for Revit and CNC Exporter, backed by local partner ARKANCE Systems BeLux, have helped an innovative producer of modular buildings based in Belgium optimize and ramp up its sustainable offsite operations to meet surging international demand.

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The story is based on the article BuildUp | Revit & Metal Framing
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Challenges

BuildUp was born nearly a decade ago as the Belgian SME ‘beSteel’. It became market leader in all of Benelux for the design and production of light steel profiles and frames. But the company saw bigger opportunities for using offsite production to make construction more sustainable and deliver better buildings with greater energy efficiency. The global construction group BESIX shared that vision; in 2021 a subsidiary of BESIX took a minority stake in BuildUp to support its startup-like trajectory.

 

“Circular construction is the future. The market needs to become even more energy-efficient and sustainable, thus many will turn to offsite building. Many older buildings need renovation for energy efficiency too. There is huge potential,” Tim Eggermont, BuildUp’s Chief Operating Officer, says.

 

Scaling up and becoming maximally sustainable and energy efficient meant technological change.

Client

BuildUp designs, fabricates and assembles custom buildings, addressing modern construction challenges in an innovative, sustainable way that has attracted a strategic investor and is driving international expansion. With its headquarters and factory in Aarschot, BuildUp is now active in Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and French and Dutch overseas territories.

Partner

ARKANCE Systems BeLux is a regional leader in the supply of digitalization solutions for construction and industry, ensuring that digital transformation results in more effective business processes.

“To meet the high demand and high requirements in the sector, we had to fully digitize and automate our pre-construction activities,” Eggermont recalls. The company was already using Autodesk Revit for 3D project design. Now it needed to do engineering in 3D as well, send data to CNC machines for precise fabrication, and always have accurate data on quantities and costs. In part, that meant doing full-fledged building information modelling and management, or BIM.
Impact

The Benelux division of ARKANCE Systems, as expert consultants and a digital solutions supplier, worked closely with Agacad to put together and implement a powerful set of tools and workflows for BuildUp.

 

Peter Bruggeman, a BIM specialist for Benelux at ARKANCE Systems, notes the solution marked both an upgrade and a simplification of life for BuildUp, which had been using several different software packages for different purposes, all of which were now covered in the one Revit environment.

 

BuildUp’s Tim Eggermont says the result has been a successful move to digital offsite construction, in line with the company’s commitment to delivering energy efficient buildings on time, within budget. All elements – including the structure, windows, doors, insulation and claddings – are designed by the company’s engineers, produced at its factory, and then transported on site for rapid assembly.

 

“Thanks to the Metal Framing tools and enhanced Revit environment, we can develop everything in the same model. This is a huge advantage for working together quickly and efficiently and adapting to our customers’ specific needs, and the final results are better,” the COO says.

BuildUp can now better optimize structures at the design stage and coordinate to reduce waste and transport. It also has better cost control and can plan more accurately to minimize construction time on site.

Bruggeman says that, to ensure success of BuildUp’s digital transformation, ARKANCE Systems’ engineers have helped the company analyse and improve its processes for design and data management, leveraging the most appropriate technologies available on the market at every step.
Everything in the
same model
Simplification
of life
Digital
offsite
construction
The fact that Agacad is also a part of the ARKANCE group of companies has made working together for and with this growing international client especially easy and beneficial – from training and workflow ideas to more technical matters of software implementation and further development. “We continue working with BuildUp as they grow and evolve, helping analyse their processes to see where even greater efficiency can be gained,” Bruggeman notes.
Products used
BuildUp chose Metal Framing and CNC Exporter, developed by Agacad. In addition to modeling walls, floors and roofs, including prefabricated panels, rafters and trusses, the Metal Framing plugin generates views with automated dimensions and accurate bills of materials and shop drawings to ensure quality production and accurate assembly on site.
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