What was the issue:
Our client was a drywall contractor; he frequently worked with construction drawings prepared by Architects and used their Revit Models for his work. The main issue that he was facing was that of generating Bill of Quantities (BOQ) from those Revit Models. These bills are generally created to estimate the costs involved in any project. This is traditionally done by a process referred to as “taking off”, which works by creating a list of all materials to be used during construction and their specific quantities (studs, frames, drywall sheets, etc.), and then estimating their cost.
The client only had 2 estimators working on his team, and as this process of generating BOQ was manual, it was taking a lot of his and his estimators’ time. They had to manually list out every material involved in the construction process, work out specific quantities and then work on pricing. This process was both hectic and time-consuming. Since the models that they were working on were created in Revit, they had no way of automating their work, as Revit does not include any built-in technology or plugin to automate the process of BOQ generation; so, the client was really stuck and required to manually generate BOQ, before he could begin with the actual construction work.
What we did:
Understanding the client’s problem, we began working on a custom plugin using different formulas which utilized standards of BOQ generation and then accurately estimated specific quantities of materials that were required. Now, the client could easily use this plugin in Revit to quickly and automatically find out how much material was required and then easily work out their cost. Effectively reducing the time and work consumed on estimation by half.
It took around 1.5 months to create this plugin and the total cost was $8000.
By paying this amount one time, the client took the benefit for his every future project.
The labor hours were greatly improved; previously, the client had a very heavy workload, he only had 2 estimators working, but the work they did was that of 4, sometimes more. Now, after using our custom plugin, he effectively slashed the workload and time consumption in half. The 2 estimators could now do their work with increased productivity and additional time on their hands to do the estimation more accurately, this also reduced material costs; since, manually generated BOQ could overestimate the materials used, thereby, increasing the actual cost. So, the client enjoyed multiple benefits like reduced material costs, improvement in labor hours, increased productivity, and reduced workload.
