Construction Planning and Design with Rajat Buildtech

Rajat Buildtech, established in 2005, is a construction company and a part of the Rajat Group of Companies, which has been catering to various industries since 1975 in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. To achieve its vision of creating significant landmarks and contributing towards urban infrastructure development in the newly formed state, Rajat Buildtech used to employ separate teams for designing, planning, and budgeting. 

Besides, most of their construction processes were manual and paper based. The teams working on the project would design traditionally through 2D drawings. This often resulted in multiple errors and improper collaboration between various design teams, which would often creep into the next stage without being noticeable right towards the end, resulting in multiple redesigns, adding to the costs and timelines. 

Moreover, due to the mostly manual processes, the team at Rajat Buildtech could see only one drawing at a time, which would demand a longer timeframe for preconstruction planning. The team would often need to go the site to manually monitor each stage of the preconstruction work. On the budgeting front, manual take offs were used to calculate estimates of the construction budgets at various stages. 

To solve these challenges, 5D VDC Services LLP used Autodesk BIM 360 and ASSEMBLE software modules enabled by Autodesk to facilitate project delivery for the Rajat Buildtech Group to solve the challenge of manual preconstruction planning and design. 5D VDC Services, a services and software training partner with Autodesk India, is a digital-first construction consultancy that aims at delivering the promise of Virtual Design and Construction across all stages of construction life cycle. The team has emerged as industry disruptors, innovators, thought leaders, and technology evangelists, harnessing the full potential of BIM across the construction spectrum.

The priority business outcomes and business improvement desired by the client were integrated with 5D VDC’s objectives and SMART project management principles to establish the following goals: 

• Digitalizing and technology upgradation for project preconstruction

• Project completion within the allotted time

• Project completion within the allotted budget

• Effective project output visualization from the beginning to streamline efforts

• Optimum resource use across the whole construction lifecycle

• Preserving and regulating project quality

• Prevention, detection, and management of risks throughout the building lifecycle

• Ensuring sustainable building development processes throughout

Along with input from numerous stakeholders, the following time-bound, quantifiable objectives were developed in order to accomplish the aforementioned objectives:

• Removing guesswork and planning incompetence to get at a workable schedule.

• For speed, accuracy, and convenience, the entire pre-construction process to be switched from manual to BIM and VDC in a matter of weeks.

• Putting in place clash avoidance and detection mechanisms to avoid conflicts and rework in later stages

• Enhancing decision-making and control of the design workflow using a centralized database and inch-to-inch detailing

• Utilizing efficient project management systems to monitor adjustments, modifications, and implementation of costs in real-time, as well as key performance indicators like: 

  • Percentage of project tasks completed on time

  • Percentage of unfinished jobs or missed deadlines for projects

  • Value as intended and price as incurred

  • ROI, for example, and so forth.

5D VDC, a services and software training partner with Autodesk India, deployed Autodesk’s BIM 360 and ASSEMBLE software modules for delivering and achieving the client’s stated objectives and building a centralized reservoir of construction data. 

Autodesk BIM 360 is a construction management software enabling cloud-based design collaboration and coordination for planning and design teams, facilitating project delivery from early-stage design through to construction. Autodesk Assemble helps make any 3D-model based design construction-ready by conditioning and connecting BIM data to design reviews, estimating, scheduling, and work-in-place tracking.

The key service benefits of these Autodesk products and solutions that were favorably leveraged for the stated project goals include:

• Effective Design and Design Management avoiding human errors, reworks, unnecessary delays, and costs.

• Quality improvement with organized workflows between various teams using centralized project data

• Simplified budgeting and cost savings using a rich database and knowhow of material requirements for construction in-built in the software

Though the technology and software were brought in when a few projects were underway, resulting in challenges of getting all the teams onboard for various stages with Rajat Buildtech up to speed with the intricacies of the software modules, the relative ease of collaboration that technology adoption brought in also helped boost the speed and productivity of all these teams at work. 

With the help of 5D VDC team’s expertise and technology assistance, Rajat Buildtech quickly realized a lot of benefits, including:

• Efficient Design and Design Management:

  • Inch-to-inch construction detailing without human errors

  • Detailed view of all design, structure, and MEPF elements for easier clash detection and resolution 

  • Elimination of unnecessary reworks, delays, and costs

  • Time savings of up to 75% for certain processes

• Organized workflows:

  • Cloud-based single-point information source for all design stages enabling transparent, risk-free, and safe construction management

  • Significant improvement in data organization and process visibility when compared to earlier scenarios

  • Each team’s work could be accessed from and captured at a single server

• Simplified Budgeting and Cashflow Management 

  • Eliminating manual estimation which would be often inflated or deflated, and finalized only after project completion

  • Accurate budgeting at each project milestone using ASSEMBLE

  • Expected monthly cashflows obtained using software which helps project fund arrangement by management early on

  • Easy and real-time revision of cashflow in case of any changes

• Huge Project Cost Savings

  • Tremendous impact on costs due to rich database and knowhow of material requirements built-in in the software

  • Accurate construction of each stage virtually helped avoid rework, revision, and correction of any sort, thus leading to more cost savings. 

• Accelerated Scaling Up

  • Technology adoption empowered Rajat Buildtech to take up multiple projects involving more than 300 apartments each

  • Despite challenges around new fiscal policies, the company scaled up its portfolio using VDC as a backbone and a strategic core of their processes. 

The Rajat Buildtech Group faced inherent challenges in their construction projects, which 5D VDC was able to resolve and deliver a significantly improved design workflow management framework for at a lower time and cost. The latter put to use the many benefits of advanced 3D modelling and end-to-end BIM services for realizing this vision.

The engagement was unique and significant for the client because to a transparent approach with well-defined project goals and standards, a skilled and tech-savvy 5D VDC team, and the utilization of cutting-edge tech tools like Autodesk's ASSEMBLE and Autodesk BIM360 Docs. 

“Despite COVID-19 times, everything was available in Autodesk BIM 360 cloud server. Because of this, WFH became easier. It took us less time in knowing the material requirements during these times,” notes Loknath Dewangan of Rajat Buildtech. 

Mrinal Golechha, Director, Rajat Buildtech, adds, “Scaling up multiple projects is now possible because we don’t have to worry about the plan and execution because the project is almost all virtually constructed beforehand.”