Rudolph and Sletten Completes Preconstruction Reviews 30% Faster by Using Bluebeam Studio for Online Collaboration
Project
Rudolph and Sletten is a General and Engineering Contracting firm based in California. For more than 50 years, the firm has been known for its innovative approach to building, a commitment that has not gone unrecognized by its clients. In fact, more than 95% of Rudolph and Sletten’s business is from repeat clients – a figure that is outstanding in the construction industry.
Recently, Rudolph and Sletten was awarded the Construction Management At Risk contract for the Preconstruction and Construction Services of the 700,000 sq. ft. Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) new San Diego Central Courthouse project. The delivery of the project allows for substantial collaboration between the AOC, design team, and Rudolph and Sletten in both development and execution of the work shown in the construction documents to ensure the project is completed on time, within budget, safely and of the highest quality.
Challenge
Given the size of this project, members of the preconstruction team are located at multiple regional offices throughout California. These team members are responsible for creating Constructability Reviews at document development milestones, which includes creating constructability comments, ensuring accurate review of the entire document set and compiling all comments generated to eliminate duplication prior to publishing the comments to the client. Typically, this requires a massive amount of document reproduction, shipping, travel expenses and extensive man-hours to review comments. Additionally, this task typically requires the preconstruction team to spend numerous hours in meetings presenting those comments to the design team and client with a traditional log format.
In order to improve project efficiency, Rudolph and Sletten decided to leverage Bluebeam Revu®, a PDF-based solution designed for the construction industry, for each phase of the preconstruction process. Revu enables users to electronically share project feedback by redlining PDFs with industry-standard markups including text, highlights, shapes, clouds, CAD symbols and takeoffs. All comments can be easily customized, and saved for reuse. Revu also includes an online collaboration feature, Bluebeam Studio™, which enables multiple reviewers to comment on the same PDF together in real time or separately on their own time.
Process
Rudolph and Sletten utilized a Bluebeam Studio session for all of the documents under review for every preconstruction team member to enter their comments, thus collecting feedback on one PDF.
Traditional Process
Drawing sets at each milestone (50% DD, 100%DD, 50% CD, and 95% CD) are reproduced and shipped to each estimator and operations support personnel contributing to the constructability review effort. Each assigned person independently reviews the drawing sets for their assigned scopes and coordination with others and distributes their comments to the team by either:
- Placing the drawing number, detail number, and comment on a spreadsheet and emailing to the other team members.
- Shipping their marked up drawings back to the person assigned for compilation of comments and input into a spreadsheet.
- Attending a joint working meeting, occurring over the course of a weeks time, where each team member presents their comments to the group for discussion.
At the completion of a typical Constructability Review period, one team member is assigned to review all comments to ensure duplicates are eliminated, verify that every comment was properly addressed to a detail and drawing number, and confirm all comments were thoroughly explained on a spreadsheet.
The team would then present each comment to the design team and client by reviewing the spreadsheet log at a central location with a hard copy printout of the documents to reference and understand each of the concerns with respect to constructability.
Refined Process utilizing Bluebeam Studio
The drawing sets at each milestone are posted to a Bluebeam Studio session. The columns within the Markups list are formatted to contain all the information requested of a traditional spreadsheet log, including comment author and the date the comment was made.
Each assigned team member is then invited to the Studio session to add their comments onto the same drawing set so they are visible to all team members. At the conclusion of the review period, the session is closed, comments are exported into an Excel spreadsheet, and drawings are sent to the design team.
As a result of this concurrent review, where team members can see comments made by other team members at all times, a better quality list of comments is generated for the design team and easily presented in a format that is more easily understood.
Results
While the San Diego Courthouse project is still ongoing, Rudolph and Sletten has already seen tremendous results from using Revu and its integrated collaboration technology, Studio, internally during the preconstruction phase.
Time saved reviewing drawings
- Traditional: 6.6 Weeks
- Utilizing Bluebeam Studio: 4.6 Weeks
- Time Saved: 2 weeks, 30% faster than traditional.
Reduced Reproduction/Shipping Costs
- Traditional: $3,571
- Utilizing Bluebeam Studio: $1,321
- Amount Saved: $2,250, a 63% cost reduction
- 5 drawing sets @ $450/each = $2,250
Other results from utilizing Bluebeam
- Minimized 30 man-hours in assembly and coordination of all comments generated, including elimination of duplicate comments.
- Reduction in 25 man hours spent reviewing scopes previously reviewed by others.
- Reduced presentation time of 16 hours for comments.
- Increased collaboration among team members for scope discussion and coordination while concurrently preparing the milestone document deliverable estimate.
- Added accuracy and quality of the estimate produced to the client.