It is a big responsibility to ensure that construction projects meet all the necessary requirements and standards in today’s highly fragmented environment. When safety, cost, schedule and performance are at stake, quality teams need every advantage they can get.
Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI) tools developed specifically for builders and developers make teams more efficient and productive while improving quality. Innovative pre-construction teams are already benefiting greatly from making AI a standard part of their QA/QC and pre-construction process.
Nibbi Brothers General Contractors, one of the leading contractors in the San Francisco Bay Area, has learned from decades of experience that the right approach is honest, collaborative, proactive and supported by advanced technology. Nibbi knows that early team collaboration and proactive problem solving can help maximize quality and prevent major problems down the road. Their expert use of technology results in fewer change orders and budget/schedule related impacts.
Nibbi Brothers General Contractors, 626 Mission Bay Blvd, photo by Bruce Damonte
In a recent case study, Nibbi discussed their use of AI and how standardizing the technology in their preconstruction team has given them a competitive advantage. With honest knowledge of Nibbi’s Quality Control Project Manager, Anita Hsieh, a licensed architect, discusses the 3 essential benefits Nibbi is achieving in its preconstruction process.
01. efficiency
Anita Hsieh, AIA, Quality Control Project Manager
Nibbi’s QA/QC team spends considerable time digging into their projects to ensure success. Adding Firmus AI-REVIEW to your toolkit provides a high level of consistency and removes a significant burden on your team related to these more tedious tasks.
“Having a tool like Firmus, with the number of projects we have at any given time, helps speed up the pace at which we can turn around projects. Being able to quickly assess the volume and extent of problems allows me to decide, for example, that I’m not going to spend more than three days looking at this because the drawing set is not developed enough.”
When the QA/QC team runs things over to the operations side of the house, “I think they appreciate that it takes some of the burden off them, too. They don’t have to find these tiny problems six months into the build, which is it results in a waste of time, resources or budget. At the end of the day, I can sleep better knowing I did as thorough a job as I could with the tools I had,” Hsieh said.
02. Actionable insights
Firmus AI-REVIEW analyzes construction drawings to identify incomplete design, scope gaps, missing information and discrepancies. It enables users to efficiently address identified issues, ensuring project accuracy and allowing them to gain a competitive advantage. “It is a comfort to know immediately, for example, that these sheets are missing. Another big problem is timings – door timings, window timings, for example, tend to always be a bit anemic or lost. I don’t have to go through the whole set just to find out that information is missing. I think this is great because then I can focus on a more difficult and complex detail instead of studying every label on the window,” said Hsieh.
“He uses Firmus in all our projects, mainly multi-family residential, in the first CDs, but lately I have been experimenting with loading DD at 100%, depending on development level. And that’s been helpful, too, because if most of the DNA is there, I can start. We’re also exploring doing a 100% DD and then doing multiple benchmarks, like a 25% CD and then a 100% CD to see how Firmus can track the same project and potentially the same feedback.”
“One of the trends that has been interesting to see is with civilian drawings. For example, there have been times when utility connections are not coordinated. The existing connections do not match because they are not coordinated between the other trades. These identified issues have been good to see because it’s something that can be easily missed and then when it’s caught at the start of construction, it causes a huge coordination time problem. There have also been problems in the MEP drawings, for example, the coordination between lighting plans and architectural reflected ceiling plans that do not match. It’s just the icing on the cake of things that are definitely important. I can package this information and send it to the architect for review. No need to even summarize it for them. It’s obvious what the problem is and that’s been great.”
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