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Dutch firm’s precast work gets a major boost from Agacad BIM software and support

A BIM modelling and consulting firm in the Netherlands has found big added value in the unique features of Agacad Precast Concrete work in Revit as well as in the company’s ongoing expert support.

Challenges

BIM4ALL takes pride in staying at the cutting edge of the technologies which are boosting quality and efficiency in AEC. That means a focus on both state-of-the-art tools and employee expertise. In this case, the company needed a better way to design precast concrete elements in Revit®.

 

“We’d started working a lot with developing concrete casings and production drawings. We do that on the base of assemblies,” says Niels Docter, a BIM modeller at BIM4ALL.

BIM4ALL B.V.

BIM4ALL is an innovative BIM services and consulting firm based in Rijssen, the Netherlands, a home to prominent construction companies. It works on a wide range of projects for buildings, utilities and infrastructure.

Working with precast assemblies in plain Revit requires a lot of time-consuming manual work, he notes, explaining the company’s search for BIM tools to automate things like view layouts, dimensioning and take-off, and for quickly inserting elements to achieve greater detailing. “The software needed to be simple to learn and use. And it had to let us get right to work without a lot of complicated setting up,” Docter says.
Impact

After starting to use Agacad’s software for precast concrete modeling, BIM4ALL was immediately impressed that it could quickly sort and/or renumber precast elements based on any parameter, add information to them, recalculate shared coordinates, and create new shared parameters.

 

“There are benefits here that we can’t get from other tools. We use elements with all different names, which is normally hard to do in Revit. But with this software it became easy to make any assembly unique.”

 

The ability to create and manage assemblies turned out to be even more valuable.

“What’s most useful? The automatic measurement of elements. Making the walls unique and automatically entering the gravity point. The software itself measures. So we save a lot of time in the preparation of assemblies, which are then easy to update and maintain,” Docter says.

“The great advantage is we don’t have to make every element ourselves. Once a parameter is added, the software does all the work.”
Faster
design
Better
quality
More
complex
projects
But Agacad has not just provided software, the engineer stresses. It's also shared valuable productivity tips and industry insights in the context of ongoing support: “Working with Agacad has helped to expand our team members’ know-how, especially on working with prefab construction and automating drawings. We’ve gotten some really good tips that certainly have helped us in our work,” Docter notes.
Products used
BIM4ALL chose Agacad’s Precast Concrete suite. “We had a positive experience in the past with Agacad software, so we chose to go with them again and were not disappointed,” says BIM Modeller Niels Docter. The Precast Concrete package includes split, update and modify options for precast walls and floors, as well as rules-based batch insertion of connection details, plates, grout tubes, etc., and easy renumbering/marking of elements. The software also creates element views with automatic dimensions, and generates bills of materials and shop drawings for combinations of structural and architectural elements.
3D modeling and drafting software for precast concrete buildings

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