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Success Story

Workflow Automation - Processes Reduced From Hours to Minutes

Workflow Automation - Processes Reduced From Hours to Minutes

Customer challenge

Lerch Bates, an elevator consultant engineering company, was struggling to maintain enough qualified drafters and engineers to keep up with their ever-growing workload. The team was being slowed down by the tedious and time-consuming manual process related to the initial design process of elevators. Lerch Bates was in conversation with Applied Software around software renewals, when the Autodesk Service Provider asked them if there were any workflows that could be made smoother for the team.

Project goals

The main goal of this project was to automate the first 30% of the design process.

Solution

Applied Software helped to automate the design process workflow using Revit. The Applied team took all of the data available, and using the Revit add-in, were able to put it into a database called the "megabook". This new tool takes a few simple steps: input high-level details, such as the number of floors, elevator speed, capacity, and cab height; and then the tool filters through all the available data and shares out the template that best fits the needs for this specific elevator.

Business outcome

A process that would typically take ten hours total, more than three hours digging through data and more than six modifying the design, was reduced to a process that took mere minutes.

Conclusion

This workflow automation helped tackle engineering processes up front and put all available data into a megabook that could be easily accessed to find the best fit. Engineers now only need to input a few data points and a template that will best fit the specifications will pop out. The engineer can then take that and make project-specific modifications. Lerch Bates no longer needs to struggle through hours of design work. Engineers can use their new automated tool to get what they need faster.

Project summary

    Duration & delivery

  • 90
  • 2020-11-03

    Autodesk solutions

  • Revit

    Services provided

  • Solution Optimization Services
  • Data Migration

    Customer industry

  • Other Engineering Industries
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Progressing Forward with Vault

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Revit Implementation to Stay Competitive

A few years ago, Limbach leadership began seeing an increasing demand for Revit-only projects on the East Coast of the US and the Midwest. National VDC Manager Mark Lamberson became aware of customer comments like, "Why aren’t you in Revit yet?" “We were a leading firm,” he said, “but were not the preferred company because of something as simple as that in some instances.” That spawned the decision to support the switch to Autodesk Revit and create a team to implement it. “We had to do it.” People with 30 years of AutoCAD experience had to completely change the way they did things. The company took the transition slowly, with some branches transitioning earlier than others. Lamberson monitored how groups were doing in their adoption. When Limbach began its Revit implementation, it was involved in mega-projects around the country, so the company wasn’t able to adopt Revit completely on a massive project. Implementation began in bits and pieces, and large jobs lagged behind.


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