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Alplan Design & Planning Takes Drawing to a New Dimension

Alplan Design & Planning Takes Drawing to a New Dimension

Customer challenge

Alplan’s core business challenges revolve around the need to remain incredibly agile while also offering its clients – many of whom represent one-off projects – with a clear picture of what’s possible. When budgetary restrictions are tight, minimising rework is always important, but making changes that won’t later affect planning permission approval is paramount. “When making minor changes, you often have to change a lot in order for the planning application to not be rejected,” Edmund explains. Making such amends costs time and, in a recent period of booming business, any unnecessary time spent is potentially business lost: “I've only had six days off work in 2021,” he adds, explaining that Autodesk Revit’s competitive edge has led to a boom in business. “I’m of an age where I started on a drawing board with paper and ink,” says Edmund Mansworth of Alplan Design & Planning, discussing his company’s transformative move to Autodesk Revit.

Project goals

Covering the area in and around Cork, Ireland, Alplan is a small but agile team offering a range of solutions for both residential and commercial clients. Alplan provides a true turnkey offering, able to handle everything from surveying, design, planning permission, building control and project management as an end-to-end "one-stop-shop." Alpan's goal was to deliver a fine-tuned set of working processes – underpinned by a personal understanding of each client’s needs at a granular scale – to bring projects large and small to life with tight budget control and exacting attention to detail.

Solution

Autodesk Revit BIM-authoring technology has been designed from the ground up to make the process of conceptual design, visualisation and analysis as streamlined as possible. Revit is an industry and market-leading software application that allows planning and design businesses like Alplan to easily upgrade their modelling to stunning, detailed and immersive 3D – including automatic updates for elevation, floor plans and sections to help keep things moving. For Alplan, transitioning the design process to Autodesk Revit has proved to be an invaluable move. The improved speed of both initial design work and subsequent adjustments has had a huge impact on project efficiencies. But Edmund feels that the overall quality of his work has improved also: “What I'm producing are far, far better drawings.” Pentagon's ongoing service and support, meanwhile, has proved to be the perfect partner to Autodesk Technologies when it comes to fulfilling his project’s evolving requirements.

Business outcome

Faster work, smarter designs! “I'm now spending 80% less time drawing each building,” Edmund says of Revit’s speed and ease of use. “I can produce a house in a day that would have taken me a week before, so it’s much more efficient.” Beyond just raw speed, though, Revit’s ability to render incredibly detail-rich 3D models allows Alplan clients to experience a much more true-to-life version of their building plans via walkthroughs. “It certainly makes life much, much easier,” Edmund explains. “3D makes it very clear to the client – they can really see the finished product and that gives people a much fuller picture.” And, crucially, Alplan has found that in instances where that fuller picture prompts design changes, those changes can be actioned much quicker than ever before. That’s due to both an increase in overall drawing speed, and the magic of automatic updates to datasets like elevation.

Conclusion

“Client needs can often change to the tune of thousands of square feet per project,” Edmund says, explaining that Revit’s automated processes make those changes simple: “When we’re reworking, it's just amazing that we change the plan, and the elevations will change automatically.” For Alplan, that ability, coupled with an overall streamlining of their processes, has made Revit an invaluable addition to their day-to-day processes. With an 80% reduction in time spent modelling new projects, more immersive designs and easier reworking, Edmund says that Alplan has found Revit’s ROI to be incalculable: “I don't think you could put a value on that for an operator like us.”

Project summary

    Duration & delivery

  • 7
  • 2021-03-01

    Autodesk solutions

  • Revit
  • AutoCAD LT

    Services provided

  • System & Software Maintenance
  • Product Activation & Onboarding

    Customer industry

  • Architecture
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