See What’s New in Vico Office 4.7

Back in July of 2013, we had the privilege of meeting with construction executives and many power users for the Trimble Buildings portfolio products like WinEst, Prolog, and Vico Office. It was a real pleasure spending the week in Vail, Colorado, discussing the new and better ways our software products, and more importantly, our Trimble company, can help make a difference in efficiency, mobility, and profitability. Our secluded setting really allowed us to listen to what customers had to say about our products and hear their suggestions on how we could improve them. The advisory board setting helped us develop some clever solutions that better serve our user community.

 

Case in point. The latest release of Vico Office, R4.7, incorporates three of the ideas from the wish list sessions with our power users. Here we’ll explain just a few of the enhancements that our long-time users will recognize and appreciate!

 

Location copying. A key benefit of Vico Office is the ability to create location breakdowns for the 3D model to get quantities and costs per location. (#TrimbleTip: see the Costs per Location Report in Step 4 of the Cost Planner video training.) The locations are oftentimes repetitive, such as what you might find in an office building or apartment project. Prior to R4.7, users would create each location manually and replicate them again and again for each floor, which we heard was a bit of a repetitive and low-value task. So in R4.7 we added location copying to make this much easier. Now users can duplicate the LBS structure through many floor levels with a simple copy/paste action. After copying locations, a quick batch activation (introduced in R4.6) provides updated quantities for the tallest of buildings in the shortest amount of time. (For those of you who attended the Denver AGC BIMForum on prefabrication solutions, this is a tremendous time saver for repetitive buildings.)

 

Reference planes and document scaling. Document Controller users will love this drag and drop feature that connects the 2D document register to the 3D reference planes. (A #TrimbleTip is to use the project LBS for quick creation of the reference planes – see how to create the LBS in the Schedule Planner video tutorial.) Now, users can map all their 2D drawings to the correct reference plane with great ease and get right into comparing the 2D drawings and the 3D model. After all, we all know that the 2D documents are the contract and how important it is to ensure that our 3D model matches them for estimating, scheduling, and layout purposes.

 

Tags fields in Takeoff Manager. Customers have grown to love tags for creating all the additional data fields we can dream of to sort and report from our projects. Now, we can apply Tags to takeoff items for tracking information such as the LOD from our Model Progression Specification. Tags can now be used to automate the estimating and scheduling deliverables coming from Vico Office as we visually inspect our models with them. We’ve also added the ability to drag and drop the takeoff quantities directly into the cost plan once your done inspecting the model. Et voil�! Our downstream estimating and scheduling level of detail is in synch with the model level of detail. (A #TrimbleTip: review Step 5 – Creating Tags in Vico Office in the video training series!)

 

Check out the video below to see how it all works together...

 

 

Now as teams are coming back from the holiday break, we thought we would remind you to check with your License Administrator for the Vico Office 4.7 download link so you can get up and running with the latest functionality. If you need any assistance with the download link, just let us know – we are more than happy to help your team. You do not need a new license file – just the download link which was delivered to your license administrator – the Vico Office R4.0 license remains valid for all R4.x releases.

 

Each of our Trimble Buildings solutions are striving to meet your needs. This Vico Office release represents invaluable customer input, so please keep the great ideas coming.

 

 

Caption: Sometimes you gotta get down and dirty to come up with the best ideas. We can’t wait for our next Executive Round Table and Customer Advisory Board meetings.
 

Monitor Your LOD Workflow

If you are a regular at the AGC BIMForum then you probably know how much effort has been put into the E202 and the G202. But what you might not know is that the team at Trimble Buildings, from our roots as Vico, started work on the Model Progression Specification back in 2008.

 

Today, we are up to the third iteration of the MPS and have introduced many customers to the idea of classifying elements in Building Information Models. The results of our latest work, documented as a full blown methodology that uses Primitives with defined requirements for each of the development stages of BIM element types, can be downloaded along with the accompanying webinar.

 

In response to the increasing adoption of the LOD concept (helped tremendously by the recently completed BIMForum deliverable), the Trimble Buildings team is changing this. �Vico Office provides integrated support for the MPS using Tags within its Takeoff Manager module.

 

The workflow is straightforward:

 

1.  Define new Tags for "LOD" and "Target LOD" and predefine the values that you want to use (for example: 100, 200, 300, 350 and 400).
2.  Combine model content from the BIM’s you receive in a Vico Office project; this can be any of the supported BIM authoring tools, which include Revit, Tekla Structures, ArchiCAD and Sketchup.
3. 

For each of the element groups - Takeoff Items in Vico Office - assign a targeted LOD value. The targeted LOD value will be driven by the required quantity information for downstream processes such as cost and schedule planning.
4. 

Open each of the Takeoff Items, highlight or isolate the associated elements, review quantities and determine whether - based on LOD definitions - the LOD requirements are being met with the current model version. If it does not, select the LOD value that better matches the current state of collection of elements.
5. 

Communicate and review the current MPS status with the team using the visual feedback from the actual set of models and the search and filter capabilities of the Vico Office Takeoff Manager!

 

 

Caption: Here is one example how to use the new workflow: With the ability to store formats such as PDF and XLS, Vico Office Document Controller makes it possible to do design and MPS tracking with each new release of the model. The project’s progression specification can be stored in the Vico environment, along with each 3D model, and updates can be checked against the MPS document. Tags can be used in Takeoff Manager or Cost Planner to track the status of the model relative to the MPS requirements for that release.

 

The ability to Tag your model content, purposely organized into Takeoff Items for downstream use in cost and schedule planning, with LOD information, allows project teams to define Targets, monitor progress, and communicate gaps using the visual feedback of the integrated project model.

 

Be sure to download our MPS 3.0 Playbook (over 60 pages of methodology and best practices featuring a comprehensive listing of primitives) and MPS 3.0 Webinar. 
       

 

For more information on Trimble Buildings, our hardware, software, and VDC service offerings, or the AGC BIMForum, please visit our website or contact Holly Allison directly at +1-978-882-0170 x118.

 

Trimble Buildings GC/CM Group >< 120 Washington Street, Suite 202-C >< Salem, MA 01970 >< +1-978-882-0170