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Robertson Ceco Corporation
Design++ Based Design Automation System Shortens Delivery and Reduces Cost at higher Quality.
Robertson Ceco Corporation (RCC) employs design automation technology from Design Power to create a significant and sustainable competitive advantage by automating its building engineering and design processes. Using this technology RCC automatically engineers and details over 7000 buildings annually [over 50,000 todate]. For each building the system produces the entire drawing package, a 3D model, and the associated Building Information Model (BIM).
With over 170 Expert Design Systems (XDS) used by 300+ detailers and engineers and deployed throughout eight (8) locations, RCC is realizing the following significant advantages:
- On-time, fast delivery that builds customer loyalty.
- 60%+ reduction in detailing time for complex buildings
- 70%+ reduction in chargebacks due to high design quality
- 30%+ increase in high margin complex building orders
- Consistent use of standards that reduce costs.
Click here to see a 3D model of a church structure.
(requires Autodesk's free DWF ViewerTM V7.0) [1.01Mb]
Targeting Complexity
The metal building industry is fiercely competitive and cyclical. Standard buildings offer low margins. Buildings of higher complexity carry higher margins but take considerably longer to design and engineer and are more prone to mistakes.
To support increasing complexity of the building mix while retaining high quality with short delivery time RCC decided to invest in the development of a rapid metal-building design and detailing system that capitalizes on the company's in-house metal building design expertise.
Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Understanding that optimal automation is a quest for all manufacturers in their industry and that being the first to deploy a fully automated design system provides a sustainable competitive advantage. To reach this goal RCC needed the means for rapid development. With Design Power, RCC found a partner with an infrastructure technolgy that significantly reduces the development effort. In a relatively short time, RCC reached the deployment stage of XDS, which automatically produces a Building Information Model (BIM) and associated 3D model, detailed manufacturing and erection drawings, numerical code for manufacturing equipment, and numerous integrated reports that support the building manufacturing and erection process. It was obvious from the first deployment that XDS would provide RCC with cost and schedule advantages that could not be matched by RCC's competition.
The Building Knowledge and Information Model
The heart of XDS is Design++, a design automation engine from Design Power, that uses a Building Knowledge and Information "SuperModel" to automatically build a detailed Building Information Model (BIM) with associated 3D model and drawing package for each building to meet RCC's customers' specifications. (See example of BIM in figure 2.)
Figure 2: This figure shows various details of the Building Knowledge and Information SuperModel and the instantiated BIM:
- A project window providing access to the active BIM and the collection of associated knowledge libraries that together form the "SuperModel".
- A part of the BIM, which serves as the BIM browser
- An example of a knowledge library browser (the "Drawings" library)
- A BIM component attribute browser and editor with access to attribute values, definitions, and rules.
- A 3D CAD rendition of the automatically engineered and designed building structure.
Manufacturing: Alive and Well
Much of U.S. based manufacturing is going off-shore. As a net exporter, RCC is a splendid exception to this trend. By employing knowledge technology to harness and deploy core product and process expertise, RCC has proven that cheap labor is not necessarily success factor keeping manufacturing alive and well in a very competitive environment.
The Ultimate Productivity Engine
"Since implementing Design Power's technology, Robertson Ceco has seen a record rise in productivity."
Roger Burlingame, Vice President Technical Services, RCC
"We found that using this technology we replaced a million-line program that handled 20% of our business with 500,000 lines of Design++ engineering rules that handles 85+% of our business."
Robert Carr, Engineering Manager, RCC.
"This is exactly the direction that the design world has to move in. It [XDS] ties their [RCC's] whole company together."
Carol Bartz, CEO of Autodesk at a CIO conference after seeing the XDS application in action.
"The most significant benefit from RCC's point of view is that we can do a variety of buildings with a standard, manageable set of parts and pieces. This results in quantifiably shorter design cycles for new custom designs. It also allows us to serve more customers with different requirements faster and with fewer errors than the competition at lower costs."
Roger Burlingame
"When we demonstrate our XDS solution, the response is universal... jaws drop to the table and we often hear the exclamation - 'That is incredible!'."
Roger Burlingame
Sample Drawings
Please, click on the link below to see detailed drawings
The drawing window activated by the hyperlink below allows you to look at sample drawings. All drawings have been automatically generated. By selecting the file icon you can load listed drawing. You can ZOOM (in, out, window, All), PAN the drawing and make it monochrome using the icons in the drawing control bar. The church and hangar structures as well as the metal building frame are from the RCC application.
Click here to see sample drawings, select drawing from "Select drawing" dialog.
