CASE STUDY
RTV Tools
Advertorial
Automation does the work while you’re sleeping
➲T
en years after the founding of RTV Tools, CEO Jason Howden says firms need to automate design processes if they want to keep up with shrinking timelines.
While working on some large infrastructure projects I came to the realisation that with all the documentation exporting and reporting we had to do, we just weren’t going to make the deadline. Sound like a familiar story? Then it hit me over a lunch time stroll that what we needed were tools that could automate the complex documentation workflows and turn 30 steps into 3 clicks. And, that has been the RTV mantra in the ten years since. I went to my soon to be business partners and said let’s build some specialised tools that only need to be set up once and will automate everything from exporting between formats, sending to colleagues, and producing reports. No more late nights, and we might even have a chance of making our timelines. We had an aspiration for worldwide fame and fortune and Ferraris for everyone, of course – who doesn’t when they get into software development?
“
on the $1.8b Salt Lake City Airport terminal HOK are exporting more than 4700 PDF and 100 NWC files weekly.
24
www.augi.com
But never in our wildest dreams would we have expected that our tools would go on to shape some of the largest projects in the world by automating their workflows. Projects from the New Karolinska University hospital, one of the world’s largest and most complicated health care facility ever documented in Revit, all the way through to assisting with design information on the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland. Our customers span from sole practitioners in Wellington using our software to do residential design documentation, through to the largest consultancies in the world like HOK and GHD. For example, when architectural and engineering firm HOK took on the $1.8b Salt Lake City Airport terminal they found themselves having to export more than 4700 virtual prints and 100 Navisworks files weekly from the design model. This posed a real problem because it was taking designers two weeks to manually export and get the information to everyone who needed it, by which time it was already out of date. Then they started using RTV Tools’ Xporter Pro to automate the documentation process. It allows users to schedule tasks to complete including file exports, printing, and files upgrades on Autodesk Revit files. This meant they could set it to export each night and the information would be ready and up to date in the morning. This was revolutionary because not only were they saving weeks of time over the project, they were able to work on the design right up until the deadline. It was so good they wanted to name November 2017