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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
February 2022 #14271 Page #108
The Scalable LotSpec Solution from Simpson Strong-Tie By Simpson Strong-Tie Staff s one of the top 10 private homebuilders in the US (and one of the top 25 overall), Gehan Homes has explored its fair share of technologies promising efficiency and productivity gains. When it came to pulling home designs, plans, elevations, and options into full job start packets (JSPs), the Texas-based homebuilder managed to generate about 400 JSPs per year before the productivity cost of eight hours each began to limit growth.
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When Sumitomo Forestry America acquired Gehan in 2016, the builder was bolstered with new financial resources to pace expectations of continued growth as a leading homebuilder. And indeed, Gehan would add eight new product lines over the next few years and almost triple their volume from 1,400 to 3,700 starts. To manage the JSP process, Gehan adopted Revit building information management (BIM) software from Autodesk. “With the new growth came the need to find new efficiencies managing options and plan sets, and we saw some value with Revit, which promised to cut JSP production times in half,” says Gehan product manager Robert Griffith. With an additional modeling tool app bolted on the platform to manage material and cost breakdowns, JSP production time was down to two hours. Despite the improvement in productivity, problems with the software stack quickly revealed themselves. “We were still spending an inordinate amount of time doing dimensioning and annotations, and those just didn’t transfer to the JSPs,” Griffith says. “The software couldn’t handle it, so it meant we were still doing a lot of repetitive work.” Despite the software glitches, the time savings was a plus, and Gehan began converting existing plans and rolling out new product lines on the system. When the chance came to view the LotSpec solution from Simpson Strong-Tie with another builder owned by Sumitomo, Gehan team members — somewhat resigned to dealing with glitchy technology — accepted the invite with some skepticism. “We had already rolled out some new product lines with our existing software and had little interest in moving to something new,” Griffith says. “We were unsure what to expect, but came away from our first meeting very excited about the possibilities. For every deficiency we were struggling with in our current solution, there was a solvable opportunity for us in LotSpec.” An application add-in suite for Autodesk Revit and Autodesk AutoCAD Architecture, LotSpec provides a solution for managing design options in both 2D and 3D workflows, automating the process of creating “lot-specific” construction documents used for permitting and construction based on customer option selections. Continued next page
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