In this video, the team from Apollo Mechanical Contractors, a full-service mechanical construction company that provides pre-construction, construction and design build services, provides their insights and benefits of using the VisualLive’s Augmented Reality (AR) software and Microsoft HoloLens 2 over the past few years.
Pairing VisualLive’s Mixed Reality AR technology with the HoloLens 2 headset running CAD plugins Revit or Navisworks and utilizing Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology, Apollo has saved valuable build time and cost-saving benefits in fabrication, rework requirements (both on-site and in the design office) and avoids issues with other trades before their work even begins.
Eldon J. Parry – Apollo Mech Project Manager High-Tech Division
We’ve been with VisualLive since its inception. One of the good use cases we’ve seen from VisualLive is its ability to get up and running very quickly even with non-experienced users.
Rework Benefits with AR:
In a self-performing trade, which is what Apollo Mechanical is, rework is costly. You have workers standing around trying to diagnose what the issue is to begin with. You then have to translate the change to a drawing, then get it over to a fabrication facility. Then they will need to re-fabricate it which becomes a costly waste of materials. In the meantime, the workers have to disrupt what they were planning on doing, they lose their continuity of work while they’re waiting for the rework to finish. This equates to a lot of dollars and a lot of lost scheduled time.
Seeing the Virtual Model before Installation:
With the ability to see the virtual model leads to saving a lot of time, money and materials because anytime you’re able to keep continuity of work and a plan, you’re on the most efficient path. This means you’re eliminating the unnecessary waste your trying to get rid of on the jobs. You’re saving money because you don’t have people doing things twice. Every time you have rework you inherit double handling. You have material getting burned and sometimes that material can’t be reused and must be re-purchased to continue. Schedule Time: you save schedule time which in the end saves the client time and from a production standpoint this allows you to move man-power around more efficiently because it’s a predicable layout.
When it came to hand detailing there’s a relatively high margin of error that was acceptable in the field. Now we can utilize VisualLive, BIM, AutoCAD and the headset (Hololens 2) to see what fits, our rework is much less than it was before. I don’t know if we have a “handle” on exactly where it is but it’s definitely less than 10% which is half of what we suspected it was before. Putting dollars to these rework figures, I would suspect it’s in millions of dollars per year.
Travis David – UA 290 Piping General Foreman
It’s invaluable in the field to be able to visualize piping systems (to scale) in their place, installed before you even begin fabrication.
Tim Veenker – Apollo Mech Project Manager
The value I see in the software is great. The amount of conflicts that can be resolved before installation… Our installations go much smoother with coordinating with other trades as far as where their lines are running versus our lines.
We are able to block out other areas where our installations can go eliminating conflicts that we would otherwise have in a conventional on-site building and fabrication methods where you don’t have the visualization tool prior to install.
David Oppliger – UA 290 Pipe Detailer
I work as the Process CAD Manager at a high-tech job that we have. It’s been great using VisualLive for the last two years. It’s really helped getting installations and detailing issues cut down by 15%-20%.
Tim Wiley – Local 16 Sheet Metal Detailer
We can go out there with our control points and basically walk through the model and check everything for fit to make sure we’re not hitting any existing conditions and ensuring that we are making all of our connection points that we need to make.
We can show the customer what’s going on and what we’re building. This allows us to receive any changes from the customer and make the necessary adjusts very quickly.
About VisualLive
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One Response
Mechanical testimony is really interesting and nice to learn more. Thanks for sharing.