Ryan Companies Looks to Revu to Improve Efficiency for a Large, Multi-Phased Project

Background

Ryan Companies Inc., a national developer, designer, builder and real estate manager, is providing design-build services for the new Marina Heights project in Tempe, Arizona. This $600 million, 2-million-square-foot mixed-use development will consist of five office towers, three to four stand-alone retail buildings and two below-grade parking levels. It is also the largest office development project in Arizona history. Adjacent to ASU’s Sun Devil Stadium, the project sits along the Tempe Town Lake.

Challenge

At the time of this writing, the project has been in design for over a year and is scheduled to continue through summer 2014. Because of its large size, the project is being completed in multiple phases, with several buildings in design while others are already under construction. As part of the phasing, there are multiple bid packages and different document packages to review at each stage of the design. With more than 60 project managers and team members in the field reviewing each package, and hundreds of drawings to manage, the team was looking for an efficient way to communicate among all project stakeholders, including the client, State Farm and the City of Tempe.

Solution

Already a Bluebeam customer, Ryan has had great success using Revu for document comparison on previous projects. Still, as Mike Prefling, virtual design and construction manager for Ryan put it, “We are always looking for new and innovative ways to utilize Revu on our projects, but the Marina Heights project team really wanted to push the limits on this one with Bluebeam Revu.” The team decided that the complexity of its project made it a perfect candidate for online collaboration, so it implemented Revu’s Studio Projects feature to internally host its document sets.

Ryan initially used Revu for internal communications, inviting team members within the company to weekly “charrettes” where they could all jump into the assigned set of project documents on their own time. Everyone was given a week to review their scope and mark it up with their comments. Ryan soon expanded the Studio Project to include its architectural design partner, DAVIS, and the engineering team, who loved how easy it was to review everyone’s markups and compare drawings.

Results

Now that everyone on the team is using Studio Projects to collaborate on document reviews digitally, they find not only are they saving time, but their accuracy has also increased significantly. Ryan Companies is also saving money in one major category: plan printing. This means that at each document publication stage, a printed set of documents would have been distributed to every person doing a review. The cost for a half-size hard copy print is $1,200. This cost has been eliminated due to the digital review, and therefore to date the team has saved $151,200. Once all six building packages are fully permitted, Ryan anticipates a total cost savings of $252,000.

Everyone on the team including, Ryan, DAVIS and the engineers also loves that Revu is simple for them to adopt since it’s easy to learn, even for those who aren’t tech savvy.

As the project moves forward, more and more people are being added to the project team. With multiple phases happening at the same time, sometimes there are hundreds of people reviewing documents, so having an effective way for all of them to collaborate is critical. Prefling shared, “Bluebeam Revu and Studio have become the engine for driving this project forward and facilitating all communication between the GC, design team and City regulatory group. We can easily send a 200-page set out to our internal team, let them mark it up, send it on to the architectural team for their comments, and then send submittals to the city.”

As the City of Tempe started to receive those submittals, it was impressed with how smoothly Revu managed the process, and wanted to learn more since it was looking for ways to improve efficiency and reduce paper usage. The city ended up liking it so much that it also decided to become Revu customers, and are using the document comparison and search functions as part of its review and permitting processes.