Contractors need to make their documents accessible and mobile and construction plans top the list of most accessed documents from the job site and in the office. Plans are the basis of our construction projects. Referenced from preconstruction to close-out, the plans are the foundation of a construction project. Converting them to PDFs and passing them around makes sense, but you can do much more. What can you achieve with a paperless plan room? You'll need all these capabilities or you'll be printing large format drawings again.
Converting to PDF and numbering the plan set
When you receive your plans they can arrive in CAD with vector graphics, print or be a set that was scanned and sent to you. They aren't always in the correct layout and certainly aren't ready for sharing easily. Bluebeam Revu lets you access an unlimited number of files and view them as a single document, in a single tab. Filter and organize files by page label or numeric sequence and automatically identify addenda using "Sets". They also have an iPad app for accessing and marking up documents on the go, Interested in how sets work? Watch this video:
Interactive Plans with Hyperlinking
Imagine a plan set that has a live table of contents, hyperlinking of all details from the reference symbols and RFIs and Submittals embedded directly on the plans. Click on a symbol and it jumps to the detail. When you're done with the detail click "back" to jump to where you left off in your plan review. Have an RFI? Send it to the Architect and when he replies, drop a reference hyperlink onto the plan that when clicked opens the RFI (a multi-page PDF). Using Bluebeam Links and Places this video shows how to make hyperlinks even when drawing details shift on addenda.
Collaboration
PDFs are great for sharing, but when it comes to collaboration it becomes a bit more challenging. If you need input on the same plan set from the architect, engineer, 4 contractors and 2 suppliers, emailing the same PDF to everyone isn't the ideal. Today you can invite them all to a Bluebeam Studio session and have up to 500 people adding markups to a single PDF simultaneously. Your preconstruction meetings no longer need a scribe to keep track of who said what. What's great is you can also leave this Studio web meeting open ended, so you can jump back in and reply to questions, add more mark-ups or drop in images. With permission you can also add additional documents. Every license of Revu comes with Studio and Studio Projects (where you can also upload other document types into the cloud for sharing, checkins/outs and revision control).
Estimating Take-off
While many on-line plan rooms offer measurements, Bluebeam Revu Measurement tools offer customization and have advanced functions like visual search - to count all the electrical outlets, fire sprinklers, or any other symbols on the plans for you. Often plans have different scales. Bluebeam addresses this with "Viewports", allowing you to calibrate areas that as you navigate throughout the plans, the correct scale is waiting for you to use length, area, and volume measurements.
Electronic Slipsheeting
Once you start receiving revisions and addenda, the plans are no longer static. These changes often need to have your RFI's and submittals slip-sheeted underneath the mark-ups. This is easy with the replace pages function in Bluebeam Revu. Just make sure you check the box to keep the mark-ups in place and replace the underlying content only.
Document Comparison
As a specialty contractor it's not always easy to spot the changes on these PDFs either as the Architect or GC may not cloud all the differences. With Bluebeam you can have Revu cloud all the differences between the original and addendum for you in a few seconds. You can have it compare full plan sets too. We covered this in this previous blog post on
the Paperless Office
Real-time Updates
Need to know what was completed today? All the mark-ups on a Bluebeam PDF automatically are logged in the Mark-ups list, a spreadsheet like log that keeps track of all markups and who placed them on the PDF. The mark-ups list has columns for measurement, status (rejected, approved, etc), check boxes, and offers easy customizing for things like responsibility, pricing columns, etc. You can also add notes to a mark-up which is great for asking, clarifying and answering questions.
Visual Punch and Back Check
The punch process leverages the symbol tool chest, a list of punch symbols that have a description attached to them. Punch symbols can be imported (Bluebeam has many available for download by trade) or you can customize your own. Drag the punch symbol from the tool chest onto the plan and drop it where the problem is. It goes into the mark-ups list where it can be filtered, sorted and emailed to the correct trade. An email includes the plan pages and the list of markups (with a snaphot of the punch symbol and full text description of the problem. Each symbol is hyperlinked to the position on the plan page where the problem was noted - making it easy for the subs to know where to work. When usng with the status column you can define a mark-up to change color as you change status (completed, approved, etc), which is ideal for back check. Visually you'll know what punch items have been completed by the subcontractor and are ready to inspect and approve.
Interactive As-Builts
By now you're thinking with RFIs and Submittals on my plans how do I share all this and deliver something useful to the owner and facility manager? Bluebeam Revu makes it simple. By flattening the Bluebeam PDFs, all the hyperlinks are active using other PDF programs including Acrobat's Free Viewer. Hyperlink the O&M manuals for the FM and he'll be happy. You can even add photos to your PDF.
Now when you decide to go paperless in your planroom you'll realize that electronic plans need to be flexible because they are references for a variety of reasons. Keeping a single source for your trades, suppliers and owners in PDF makes it easy for everyone to view what they need. Using Bluebeam Revu makes the whole lifecycle of the plan set a snap! If you'd like to take your planroom paperless, please
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My next blog post will go in depth on Document Collaboration in a Paperless Office. Many Construction firms have replaced Acrobat Pro with Bluebeam Revu Extreme just to save on recurring costs in the IT department since maintenance is about 40% less. If you have Bluebeam and haven't leveraged it to it's fullest capacity or have questions, I'm here to help.