Interview with SCA Consulting Engineers

Company Name	SCA Consulting Engineers
Address	12511 Emily Court
City, state, ZIP Code	Sugar Land, Texas 77478
Phone number	(713) 779-7252
Web site address	www.scaengineers.com
User	Gregg Kite
Title	Director of Production
E-mail address	[email protected]

 

Our recent Blog entry comes from Lone Star State! 

Considered by many of its residents and others, such as myself who have driven through it, a country onto itself!  This state boasts many great things, including home to a great Structural Consulting Firm SCA Consulting Engineers. 

Everyone should know that SCA was our very first Revit Structure Customer!  Gregg Kite, the Director of Production at SCA was kind enough to take some time out of his schedule for this interview and to share with us some great images.

 

• Culotta:  Please tell us about your business, the markets you serve and the services that you provide.

   

  • Kite:  Founded in 1983, SCA Consulting Engineers has provided structural consulting services for thousands of projects for the industrial, commercial, financial and health care markets throughout the United States and in Mexico, Canada, Europe, Central America, South America, Africa and the Pacific Rim. Our staff of over eighty professionals is able to take advantage of the exposure in working with national and international clients and negotiating with unique building codes and officials, allows SCA to provide creative solutions for a wide range of projects.

 

• Culotta:  What is your role in the company?  How long have you been with the company?

 

• Kite:  I am the Director of Production for SCA which means several things but in a nutshell, it is my responsibility to ensure that the appropriate team is assigned to each of our projects and that those teams have the necessary information and tools to efficiently complete our designs. I coordinate all of our project schedules with our clients and am involved in contract negotiations as well as being a liaison between our clients and our staff. I was originally hired at SCA in 1992 as a structural designer/project manager.

 

• Culotta:  Please share with us a few projects you've created with Revit Structure?  What was the situation and how did you deliver the solution?

   

  • Kite:  SCA has completed over fifty projects with Revit Structure ranging from high rise condominiums and hotels, office buildings, hospitals, retail centers, and various designs for offshore structures. While we had procrastinated in implementing Revit Structure into our wood framed projects, we are in the process of doing so now and are extremely encouraged with the results that we are experiencing.

 

• Culotta:  Are there any images you can share with us of these projects?

   

  • Kite:  SCA is extremely proud of the fact that Autodesk has chosen one of our models to be featured on the CD box covers and in the promotional material for each of the last two releases of Revit Structure. For RST 2008, Autodesk selected an image from our model of The Vue, a fifty story condominium project that is to be built in Charlotte, North Carolina. We were honored again when for the 2009 version, another image from one of our models was chosen for this distinction. That project is named Torre Administrativa and is the administrative headquarters for the state government of Nuevo Leon, Mexico. This image is displayed each time a Revit Structure 2009 user opens the program which never ceases to entertain our staff.

   

II City Plaza – Baton Rouge, LA    Click here to View DWF model

1900 McKinney – Houston, TX    Click here to View DWF model

 

C&M Marine Deck House – Offshore Barges    Click here to View DWF model

 

Streeterville – Chicago, IL    Click here to View DWF model

 

The Vue – Charlotte, NC    Click here to View DWF model 

 

Brooklyn Village – Charlotte, NC  Click here to View DWF model

 

Centro de Gobierno Plaza Civica – Monterrey, Mexico      

Click here to View DWF model

Prime Outlet Mall – St. Augustine, FL  Click here to View DWF model

 

• Culotta:  When did you and the company begin using Revit Structure?

 

• Kite:  SCA has been using Revit Structure since the release of the original Beta version early in 2005. We were actually able to complete our first Revit project before Release 1 was made available to the general public.

 

• Culotta:  What were you using before?   For how long were you using it?

   

  • Kite:  Personally, I was using AutoCAD for several years before joining SCA but I believe that the company has been using AutoCAD to some degree for around 19 years.

 

• Culotta:  What made your company switch to Revit Structure and how did you do it?

   

  • Kite: The answer to the first part of this question is actually a pretty good story and one that I enjoy to telling. Mark Shepard, one of the owners of our firm, dropped by my office one afternoon after returning from a business trip. It seems that Mark had read a Revit advertisement in an in-flight magazine and had decided then and there that SCA should begin to design our projects in 3D. You can probably imagine the reaction to this decision from an old "CAD Jockey" like me.

     

    I politely began to explain to Mark that he had no idea what he was talking about and how 3D drafting applications were not conducive to SCA's workflow. Mark listened to my objections and then calmly told me that while he respected my opinion, this was something that he wanted me to investigate.

     

    Frankly, I simply ignored Mark's instructions until a couple of weeks later when he asked me what I had learned. My response was that I honestly thought that this was a waste of time and had not believed that he was really serious about the prospect of implementing new software that would be such a big departure from what our staff was very successfully using currently.

     

    Well, my arguments were not enough to sway Mark and he made it clear that this was a priority with him and that I should make it one of mine as well, so I began my research.

     

    Very quickly it became embarrassingly obvious to me that the developments in 3D modeling technology had made tremendous advancements while I had been very busy ignoring them. Immediately, I upgraded half of our AutoCAD seats to Architectural Desktop but soon discovered that this solution fell far short of what we were looking for. After inquiring with numerous companies that were producing BIM products, I learned that Autodesk was in the process of producing a version of Revit for structural engineers that would be able to be exported to a variety of structural analysis programs.

     

    It was at this point that we as a company made the leap and after numerous conversations with the Revit Structure development team, SCA was invited to participate in the initial Beta testing program. The rest is history and we have never regretted our decision.

   

• Culotta:  What is the biggest advantage or benefit to your company in using Revit Structure?

   

  • Kite:  I hope that someday soon I will be able to say that the biggest benefits are the bi-directional links to structural analysis software but to date we have been disappointed with their reliability. Unfortunately, the various structural analysis companies that Autodesk has partnered with are responsible for creating the link to their respective programs and each of them have shown a different level of commitment to this effort. Certainly, once the analysis partners realize the immense value that these links provide and the links are improved to the extent that we are truly able to use a single model for multiple roundtrips between Revit Structure and the various analysis programs, the advantages of this collaboration will be tremendous.

     

    I have to believe that once Autodesk has adapted Robobat for use in the US market, their link will be the most reliable and this is something that we anxiously anticipate. Currently, we are experiencing erratic results depending on which analysis package we are using for a specific project but we are always able to take advantage to some degree of geometry from the Revit models to create our analysis models

     

    Other benefits to using Revit Structure are the vastly improved coordination between the architect's design intent and within our own set of construction documents. Additionally, our responses to RFI's during the Construction Administration phase of our projects is being streamlined with the use of 3D views that have been oriented to a specific section, allowing the contractor to better visualize complicated areas of the structure.

 

 

• Culotta:  How does your company transfer the benefits gained in using Revit Structure onto your client?

 

• Kite:  It is actually my primary focus this year to identify new ways to share SCA's data rich models downstream so that they can be leveraged by contractors during construction. It has been frustrating to me that these very valuable models are hitting a dead end at our front door and not being utilized beyond our office.

   

  It is very encouraging to see that the construction community is rapidly embracing BIM as I honestly believe that they are the part of the process that can potentially benefit the most from this technology which in the end, benefits the owner. Material take-offs and estimating are just the beginning and as fabrication drawings are able to be generated with AutoCAD Structural Detailing directly from Revit Structure models, I am confident that we will begin to see wide spread adoption of Revit by contractors. This is sure to have a dramatic and positive impact and on the way that relationships are structured between the construction and project design teams.

 

• Culotta:  What kind of return on investment have you seen since using Revit Structure?

   

  • Kite:  After our staff gained proficiency with the software, we have seen reduced man-hours in virtually every phase of our Revit Structure projects and one benefit that we are only now fully recognizing is the streamlining of our Construction Administration phase. It is clear that our drawings are better coordinated and more dimensionally accurate with Revit projects which reduces the number of RFI's and questions in shop drawing submittals.

     

    However, these gains did not just happen overnight as we invested heavily in training for our staff and the obstacles encountered in abandoning our expertise with AutoCAD and implementing a brand new workflow have definitely been challenging. To his credit, our CFO remained patient as we expended training funds for many months and now after seeing the results, he is probably the biggest proponent of Revit in our office.

     

• Culotta:  Anything else you'd like to share about your experience with Revit Structure?

   

  • Kite:  SCA has been very fortunate to have been able to work closely with the Revit Structure development team and that relationship is one in that is very important to us. Nicolas Mangon and his entire team have been there for SCA whenever we have stumbled and our success in implementing Revit Structure within our office has clearly been important to them as I am sure it is with all of their customers. Our achievements with Revit Structure are in no small way a tribute to their dedication and belief in the product and we look forward to working with this group for many years to come.

 

• Culotta:  If you could give one piece of advice to someone in the field of structural engineering who is NOT using Revit Structure today, what would it be?

   

  • Kite:  Get on board or get left behind.

     

    With the proliferation of BIM that we are witnessing worldwide, it is only a matter of time before it becomes the standard in our industry. Failure to adopt this rapidly growing technology could prove to be far more costly tomorrow than the cost of implementing it today.

    One analogy would be the rate at which the industry adopted AutoCAD beginning some twenty years ago. For literally hundreds of years, construction drawings were produced manually with pen and paper and when some refused to embrace the adoption of computer aided drafting, they soon became obsolete. The adoption of BIM is gaining acceptance at a much faster pace than CAD did and firms that ignore this shift in technology could easily face the same fate.

 

 

Comments

[James]

Considered by many of its residents and others, such as myself who have driven through it, a country onto itself! This state boasts many great things, including home to a great Structural Consulting Firm SCA Consulting Engineers. Everyone should know that SCA was our very first Revit Structure Customer! Gregg Kite, the Director of Production at SCA was kind enough to take some time out of his schedule for this interview and to share with us some great images.

[software test consulting]

Here I am with you James. This state boasts many great things and now Everyone should know that SCA was our very first Revit Structure Customer!. And Gregge Kite was quite kind enough to take any decision.