Revit MEP
Five Steps to Success with Revit MEP: The Reality
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his year our firm was able to identify a significantly sized project to apply Revit MEP, from concept through construction documents. We are a 300 person plus integrated AEC practice. The team consisted of 10 members of our MEP staff dedicated to the project. Although the experience proved challenging for the team, the knowledge we gleaned was invaluable.
Image 1: A screen shot of part of our MEP model.
The key to delivering projects with this tool is mitigating the most crippling weakness of Revit MEP: sluggish model performance. This reality makes or breaks the decision to apply this tool to future projects. The promise of increased productivity was rather elusive during this process, but we were able to keep the team afloat with the proper hardware, consistent training, regular model maintenance, strict modeling practices, and strict saving practices.
Step 1: Proper Hardware: Over the next few years, there is a good chance that users on any Revit MEP project will be new to the product, and will likely not be using the best modeling practices. In a Worksharing Enabled project this not only slows the individual down, but can hobble the entire team with a sluggish model. By the time our team was working on construction documents, they were running Dell
spring_2009
feature focus
by: Damon Ranieri
Consistent training is an absolute must in this working environment. ... 5400 Quad Core Workstations with Vista Business 64bit, running 16Gb of RAM, and had ATI Fire GL 256MB Graphics Cards. While throwing hardware at any workflow issue is an expensive solution, the reality is the team will need this wiggle room if they are going to stay on schedule.
Step 2: Consistent Training: Consistent training is an absolute must in this working environment. We contracted with a Revit consultant out of Rhode Island for a week of implementation training. This was followed by a week of over-the-shoulder direct project training from the same consulting group. During preliminary studies and schematic design, we offered in-house bi-weekly trade specific workshops. As new hires were added to the team, the firm utilized the application specialists from the IT department to deliver a week long in-house version of direct project training. Finally, we utilized web conferencing to deliver one-on-one training on specific topics as needed during the entire duration of the project. The amount of information needed for each team member to be successful is vast. Even power-users, who can remember all the different concepts, will need their memories refreshed when it comes time to perform the task at hand. Step 3: Regular Model Maintenance: As stated earlier, inefficient modeling practices are a fact of life as a firm begins transitioning into this new approach. By setting up a regular schedule for model maintenance the team was able to keep a handle on saving and regeneration times. This maintenance involved addressing the linked central files from the other trades, the central file itself, the modeling and the size of the central file. Linked Central Files: About midway through design development it was decided that linking directly to the architectural model became too cumbersome. The designers were already spending a fair amount of time waiting for each other to save, if the architects were accessing
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