Consistency in design quality and a well planned construction process are key ingredients to a franchise success. The Onyx Group brings the proven capabilities of implementing Building Information Modeling (BIM). BIM enables the Onyx Group to create flexible design packages that adhere to the high quality standards within various space configurations and provides a very powerful visualization tool, giving the franchisees a better idea of their investment prior to build out.

The topics discussed were: Groups, Schedules and Details.

Groups: Collection of components, building elements and/or objects that move together as a single entity after make them a group. Groups allow the user to move larger blocks of components together. A good example of this is moving a counter line group using the align tool. Say a wall moves and this causes a shift the counter line. This shift will affect all the associated bulkheads, equipment and lighting. Grouping all of these allows the user to use the align tool on the counter edge and shift everything else as well. Another useful trait of groups changes to one group instance update all the instance of the group.

Schedules: Spreadsheets used to identify equipment, finishes, and other model components. Information is pulled directly from the family and organized as into a spreadsheet. Filling in the spec information for each piece of equipment takes advantage of Revit’s ability to populate a schedule by pulling data from the components. Also as components are deleted from the project they are deleted from the schedules. Schedules can be filtered in many different ways showing different categories in different views. Still, it is best to examine schedules for accuracy. Sometimes an component can be placed twice messing up a count, or moved out of view or hidden yet it will still schedule. As long as the object meets the object type and filtering requirements for that schedule it will show up.

Details: Views of the model at larger scales that contain more information. Comprised either partially or entirely of drafted line work. Managing changes to details in similar projects presents interesting challenges. While some details are project specific, others like casework or typical bulkhead details carry over. The most straight forward method is “copy to clipboard” command. This allows the user to copy an entire view from one project to another. Working with the template file and the project file simultaneously is an option. This ensures changes, additions or lessons learned from each iteration of a Daily Grind are picked up in the next project. Thus template evolves with each new project.