CDV Systems Brings Veridian Homes to Achieve Significant Efficiencies with Autodesk Revit Software
Veridian Reduces Drafting Time for Each Plan from Two to Three Days to 3.8 Hours
Winchetser, MA. July 1, 2005 – CDV Systems, providers of Autodesk® Revit® and CodeBook courseware, training, implementation, and consulting services, has helped Veridian Homes, a leading residential home builder in the Madison, WI, achieve success -- including significant efficiencies in drafting time -- with Autodesk’s Revit software.
Veridian Homes offers buyers a choice of 43 home models, each with four to eight possible design option elevations, plus other design options. With Revit software and CDV System services for training and implementation, Veridian reduced the time required to produce a fully detailed drawing of each custom home w' Design Options from two-to-three days to 3.8 hours. Veridian Homes also achieved substantial labor cost savings. Before Revit, the company required seven drafters. With Revit it currently employs two draftsmen (and will ramp up to four) to carry the workload of building 600 homes per year.
CDV Systems helped CAD users at Veridian Homes to quickly master Revit and take advantage of its ability to automatically generate 3D virtual home models and calculate critical building dimensions from the drawings. CDV Systems provided its full, five-day, process-based, hands-on, training using its own popular courseware – plus customized implementation services. These services are designed to transfer the office CAD standards to the Revit platform to jump-start productivity in the first week. During implementation CDV Systems set up the Revit model structure in the system and helped to modify the office standard template files and the full range of office types and styles for clients’ new Revit environment.
Coming Up to Speed
“Once we decided on Revit, we researched various companies throughout the country to implement the software and ‘connected’ with CDV Systems,” ,” said Dan Gorski, Vice President of home-building services @ Veridian Homes. “We liked its hands-on approach, knowledge of the product, and experience. CDV Systems was at Veridian Homes a week at a time and suggested helpful options as our CAD users learned and worked with the system. CDV Systems also created the overall "prototype & design options" structure of the Revit models, so that our people could go into the system and easily understand how the Revit model was organized.”
“CDV Systems is honored to play a part in Veridian Homes’ commitment to building high-quality, environmentally friendly homes as efficiently as possible,” said CDV Systems President Cyril Verlay. “Our services are designed to get users production-ready in the shortest possible time – to maximize the time and cost benefits of Revit.”
Next Steps for Gaining Other Efficiencies
Veridian Homes now wants to leverage Revit to streamline the work of producing estimates for each house plan. Currently, estimators work with drawings on paper and calculators to derive measures that determine house pricing -- such as the square footage of dry wall, siding, and roofs; door and window dimensions; etc. The company is looking into extracting these figures, which are generated by Revit, via software, so estimators can input them into a report and eliminate time spent making their own calculations.
About Veridian Homes
Formed in 2003 by the merger of Midland Builders and Don Simon Homes, Veridian Homes (www.veridianhomes.com) is a family-owned company that builds 600 meticulously designed and custom crafted homes a year in Wisconsin. All of its homes are Wisconsin ENERGY STAR and Green Built Home certified. As a result of its commitment to energy-efficient building, Veridian Homes was named the US EPA Energy Star Partner of the Year in 2004. The company also provides a full range of services: from financing, to supplying leading brands of home finishes and fixtures through its Design Studio, to helping customers sell their current homes.
To read more, here is another link and quote from Dan Gorski
https://www.probuilder.com/bim-home-builders
A big challenge to Veridian Homes’ BIM implementation was allowing time for training while keeping up with production demands, says Dan Gorski, vice president of home-building services for the Madison, Wis., company. Veridian’s owners were strongly committed to BIM, including making sure staff was well trained, which was essential to success, Gorski says.
“A key was finding a trainer that worked best with our team,” Gorski says. The trainer provided a two-week course for the design team onsite, then followed that up with visits for one week a month for six months to provide one-on-one coaching. Making sure that the trainer had a good rapport with staff was crucial, Gorksi says.