With more than 100 years of construction experience, EDiS Company is well aware of the importance of evolving with the times, especially with regard to technological advances.
The Wilmington, Delaware-based general contractor offers a wide range of services including design-build, interiors and pre-engineered solutions. In addition, they also offer BIM modeling, coordination and manufacturing services, as well as virtual design and construction (VDC) for more than a decade. But in today’s demanding and tight schedules, relying solely on BIM practices is not enough to meet clients’ productivity and efficiency needs.
The magic touch
The challenge for this advanced contractor was to streamline their technology-enabled workflows. BIM provided the visual capabilities, coordinating large project teams including subcontractors, but still required considerable time to gather the data.
Chris Donahue, director of VDC BIM Services at EDiS, says, “As a construction manager on many jobs, we check the models for clashes and the buildability of each item before it goes out to bid. Then all of these issues potential issues are resolved through coordination and some redesign, which ideally minimizes change orders in the field. But we were struggling to gather data and grow our VDC team at the same time.”
Five years ago, EDiS was introduced I review, an integrated collaboration platform that streamlines AECO’s workflows and communication with all stakeholders in a unified environment throughout the project lifecycle. He continued, “It was like this magic touch to our work. Workflows started to become smoother, the schedule got shorter, and we were able to demonstrate the value of using BIM.”
One project in particular demonstrated the value of this connection.
A library of value
Bridging the gap between BIM capabilities and the larger project team was best demonstrated with EDiS’s recent $20 million Kennett Library project in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.
As a guaranteed maximum price contract, construction of the project could not exceed $21.1 million. In this case, the Integrated Collaboration Platform shortened the review, coordination and construction of the building design.
Donahue said, “Pre-BIM, we estimated it took about three to four months to coordinate a $20 million job across the entire team, including subcontractors. With BIM and Revizto, we coordinated that job in one month and a half”.
He also noted that change order rates dropped dramatically due to the coordination process. “The build was even smoother. Traders could visualize and resolve issues themselves in Revizto. Our change order rate dropped to an all-time low of 0.02%,” Donahue added.
On this project, EDiS identified errors during pre-construction that saved $220,000. Value-added engineering saved $556,000 and an estimated $6 million in labor costs. The total savings of the Kennett Library it was estimated at $1.6 million during the design and construction process.
“That’s the magic of Revizto,” Donahue said. “With Revizto, we can quickly look at contract drawings and our models. It allows us to find the errors, gather them, group them and come up with this scenario where we’re saving money. It’s a process that used to take weeks and now we do it in an hour.”
Advantage between projects
Over the past five years, EDiS has used Revizto on 42 projects, about $1.8 billion of work. The average change order rate has decreased from 5.5% to less than 1% thanks to improved transparency and problem solving across all these projects.
EDiS has continued to leverage its BIM workflow, most recently with the addition of iPads equipped with the Revizto app for field staff, which enabled the EDiS construction team to use BIM on the job.
For the entire EDiS team, the transition to BIM has been a continuous evolution. Donahue added, “Every day, we focus on how we increase the knowledge of team members so that everyone has their arms around the BIM initiative. Revizto is helping with that. We are at 48% adoption across the company, and with each job, that percentage increases.”
To date, EDiS has worked on about 20 jobs using Revizto, which equates to about $600 million worth of work.
Donahue concluded, “We strongly believe that to touch a job, we can automatically return 10% to our client’s budget because of our BIM workflow. Collaborative technologies help us deliver projects faster and under budget through more efficient coordination workflows.”
To hear the full explanation of the time and cost savings achieved with Revizto, watch the full on-demand webinar: Introducing Revizto Impact: How EDiS Breaks Platform ROI.
