When Build Health International (BHI), a Beverly, Mass.-based nonprofit, committed to designing and building the Center for Infectious Disease and Emergency Care at St. Boniface Hospital in Fondsdes-Blanc, Haiti, the organization knew from experience that bringing the project in on time and on budget would be a challenge.
Bluebeam Revu keeps project teams on the same page from design through construction
“Everything we do is focused on optimizing efficiency,” says Omar Hernandez, BHI’s director of engineering. “We know that every dollar BHI can save will be used by our NGO partners to save more lives at the facility.”
One of the strategies BHI employed to control costs and maximize productivity was to keep site visits by the U.S. team to a minimum. However, project managers knew that the more complex their project was, the more important it was to have real time access to relevant data. Where others might have seen a challenge though, BHI saw an opportunity.
The team turned to Bluebeam Revu and its cloud-based collaborative feature, Bluebeam Studio, to enable teams in the U.S. and Haiti to work together on the same set of documents in real time; increasing visibility, reducing rework, and improving accountability in the process.
“We’re designing, building and maintaining health care infrastructure in low-resource settings where we don’t have reliable data or cell signal,” says Hernandez. “But with Bluebeam Revu, all of our construction administration can be done directly within Studio.”
Accelerate Your Design Reviews
With over 1.7 million users worldwide, Revu is a project efficiency and collaboration solution for design and construction professionals. The cloud-based collaborative workflows in Revu are designed to keep teams on the same page through the design process, help move the project forward during construction and preserve important project data through handover and beyond, providing critical accountability at every step along the way.
Revu combines powerful features specifically designed to address the needs of designers and builders. Revu empowers teams to use the design documents themselves to host collaborative markup sessions, perform takeoffs, and share metadata, hyperlinks, bookmarks, images, attachments and 3-D data within the context of the drawing itself.
Architects use Revu to convert CAD drawings into high-quality 2-D or 3-D PDFs, transform scanned images into text-searchable documents, annotate and mark-up project documents, sign documents, apply seals, generate reports and improve project coordination by automatically tracking annotations.
Keeping Everyone on the Same Page
Getting timely design feedback from project stakeholders is critical for avoiding costly changes downstream, and Bluebeam tackles this issue head-on. Integrated into every seat of Revu, Bluebeam Studio connects project partners worldwide on the same set of centralized documents in real time.
Studio is comprised of two complementary features–Studio Projects and Studio Sessions. Studio Projects gives designers a single centralized location to store documents— even entire building projects—in the cloud. Studio Sessions allow project teams review, mark up, modify and update the same files at the same time so partners can instantly connect on the same set of documents.
Revu combines powerful features specifically designed to address the needs of designers and builders. Revu empowers teams to use the design documents themselves to host collaborative markup sessions, perform takeoffs, and share metadata, hyperlinks, bookmarks, images, attachments and 3-D data within the context of the drawing itself.
Revu 2019: Transforming the Way You Build
Revu has grown considerably since it was first launched in 2002, and Bluebeam raised the bar again with the release of Revu 2019 this year. Revu 2019 introduces new features and tools specifically designed to boost productivity, improve measurement accuracy and streamline deployment across organizations.
Revu 2019 enables smoother performance and faster panning and zooming of complex linework with a new hardware-accelerated rendering engine. Improved rendering speed, faster refresh and quicker initial load times allow users to pan and zoom through documents six times faster than previous versions. Revu 2019 is designed to deliver measurable improvements in speed that save valuable time no matter how large the project document set.
Accurate quantity takeoffs and cost estimates are critical to creating competitive bids, and Revu 2019 introduces features designed to improve turnaround times, reduce risk and minimize costly errors from the very beginning of the process, including an automatic prompt for setting scale and the ability to set independent units for different measurement types.
And the new Configuration Editor in Revu 2019 streamlines the deployment process across teams and organizations, boosting standardization and increasing project consistency. This new user-friendly, lightweight tool allows IT administrators to configure how Revu should be rolled out across the organization, including the settings, features and plugins.
New users will also appreciate in-app onboarding for every role in construction, especially for designers. The first time Revu is opened, users have the option to select their profile—and customize it—based on their needs that give them quick access to the tools and markups that they’ll use the most. In-depth lessons and demonstrations are available within the program itself, with more available online.
Mark Williams is the public relations manager at Bluebeam Inc., Pasadena, Calif. Find out more about what Revu can do for you and download a free 30-day trial at bluebeam.com.