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Bluebeam Helps an FFKR Project Team Find a Picture Perfect Solution
A picture is worth a thousand words – especially when that image depicts a problem on a construction site. It takes time to ship RFIs, redlined drawings and supplemental instructions back and forth between a jobsite and home office, which are often hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from each other. This means that even relatively simple problems can take a few days to resolve.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. As Steve Wall, a Construction Administrator at FFKR recently discovered, Bluebeam PDF Revu and a digital camera or camera phone can go a long way towards helping project team members solve problems in a timely manner.
It started when Steve received a phone call from a contractor at the City Creek Center construction site, a large commercial redevelopment project in Salt Lake City, Utah. One of the complex’s concrete benches was poured incorrectly and needed to be extended. The problem was pretty straight forward. The contractor needed supplemental building instructions, such as how far to extend the bench, where to drill holes for dowels and where to pour concrete. But of course, there was a tight deadline. The bench needed to be completed as soon as possible so other contractors could come in and finish the area.
From his discussion with the contractor, Steve was able to find the location of the bench on his drawing. But he knew it would take too much time to have the drawing revised, reviewed and sent back out to the jobsite. He asked for an RFI so he could get the process rolling, but also asked the contractor to email him a digital photo of the bench.
As soon as Steve received the photo, he opened up his PDF editor, Bluebeam PDF Revu. He created a blank PDF, and added the digital photo by using the Insert Image tool. He then called the project architect and engineer and held an impromptu meeting using his web conferencing software. As the three of them looked at the PDF and discussed a solution, Steve used Revu to redline supplemental instructions. He used Bluebeam’s special markup tools for design and construction users, including lines, polylines and polygons, to draw out the missing portion of the bench and its structure. Then he typed detailed instructions into callout boxes. When he finished, Steve flattened the PDF, making the image and all the markups a permanent part of the drawing, to avoid inadvertent changes.
Steve then emailed the PDF to the contractor, who began fixing the bench. The entire process took about an hour. The revised drawings, which the contractor would have been waiting for had Steve not asked for a digital image, arrived to the job site a few days later.
“Questions on the jobsite are a fact of life. Our challenge is to resolve issues promptly to keep the project moving,” said Steve Wall. “Bluebeam has proven to be a great solution not only for expediting the delivery of project solutions, but for providing the high level of detail required to ensure clarity and understanding.”
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