Tekla Oyj : Tekla News Season's Greeting 2013

This time Tekla News has little room for Tekla - thanks to our users who have been doing so much inspiring work worth sharing. Let's get straight in to the business to prove this: Wayne Brothers adopts BIM and now moves faster in their hectic environment. Tekla developer community showcases their work in the Open API extensions competition. Celsa Steel Service brings value to their customers' projects with BIM, and Strängbetong and Ramboll teams up for delivering efficiently 35,000 cast units of concrete to Mall of Scandinavia.

At Tekla, we haven't been idle either. The new Tekla BIMsight 1.9 has arrived being more global than ever and supporting Trimble SketchUp models. And in the next February, Tekla European BIM Forum 2014 casts light on standards, strategy and process with prominent keynote speakers. Come to meet us the other Tekla users who do cool things in Berlin.

We wish you the very best holidays and lots of successful projects for 2014.

Tekla News editors

Wayne Brothers, a progressive and technology-savvy commercial concrete contractor based in the Southeast USA, adopted Tekla Structures eighteen months ago.

"We use Tekla not just to address one little problem but actually embed it into our business to make it better," says Daniel Wayne, Project Manager / Director of Technology at Wayne Brothers. "This piece of software simply lets us be more successful in this highly competitive concrete market."

As a concrete contractor, Wayne Brothers has to move fast: often they need to start on site within two to three weeks from winning a contract. Before that, they have to find a vendor to detail the rebar, have it approved by the engineer, and get the rebar cut and delivered to the site.

 "With Tekla, we've reduced the time from the award to the first rebar submittal by 50 percent, allowing us to meet the most demanding schedules," says Daniel Wayne.

Now the company runs an own Wayne Brothers Information Modeling program and take BIM to field.

"We have found real advantages in putting the model into the hands of our site staff," says Ryan Barker, CM-BIM, Wayne Brothers' BIM Manager. "The field model is used for pour planning, progress tracking, coordination and safety planning."

 "There's a real benefit of putting intelligent information into the model," says Ryan Barker. "If you take the time to make it right in the model, you can automate other processes."   

Read more

The industry and networking event, taking place on February 13-14 2014 in Berlin,explores the Europeanconstruction industry and BIM, bringing you the insights and strategies for success. The forum gives its participants an opportunity to learn about current trends, strategies and success stories of other companies and make new business connections.

The event has three themes - standards, strategy and process - for which we are proud to present three prominent keynote speakers.

Common standards and shared understanding of requirements are necessary for successful implementation of BIM in the industry. In the event, we examine the increasingly active role of governments and non-profit institutions in the adaptation of BIM with the keynote speaker Paul Morrell, who has just completed his term as the first Chief Construction Adviser of the UK government.

A company that wants to implement BIM successfully needs a strategic approach. In the European BIM Forum, we learn how companies are currently incorporating BIM into their business models and creating value for their customers, a topic introduced by keynote speaker Menno de Jonge, Director of Innovation at the Dutch construction company Ballast Nedam and Vice President of the European Network of Construction Companies in R&D and Innovation (ENCORD). Finally, on the project level construction is a process and so is BIM. Together with Rafael Sacks, Associate Professor at Technion Israel Institute of Technology and internationally known expert for BIM and Lean Construction, we approach the challenge of incorporating new methods into existing processes and rethinking the way in which comapnies cooperate with partners.

Join the fellow professionals in Berlin and discover how BIM is changing the industry: register now at bimforum.tekla.com

All kinds of Tekla Structures extensions made by users and developers have been competing again: Five applications created by members of the active Tekla user community participated to the 4th Tekla Open API competition this year. 

Christopher Keyack's RememberMe was voted the winner of the competition. The application visualizes information and was designed to help model authors "remember" key areas and objects in order to easily organize the model and communicate specific model information and views to others effectively. RememberMe Keeps track of for example model locations, selected objects, camera views, workplanes, notes and part marks in the model and object representation.

Of the other contestants, PowerBeam allows selecting beams or columns in the model and then making copies in any direction. Set Next Revision creates a new revision for all selected drawings in the drawing list, adding the same revision text and date to each of the revisions. SplitM is a macro that saves time by splitting selected beams continually. Weld Converter converts model welds on a drawing into drawing welds by exporting the information into the drawing weld dialog.

Download the extensions at the Tekla discussion board (for users in maintenance only) and see RememberMe in Youtube

For the Stockholm's future shopping giant, the partnering Tekla users Strängbetong and Ramboll have a lot to produce: Above the ground level, most of the structures are precast concrete, including concrete columns, sandwich wall elements and lots of hollow core slabs, among which the ramps and light wells corresponding to skylight windows are the most complicated to manufacture. From design to delivery, the 35,000 cast units and 125,000 metric tons concrete require 30,000 man-hours of design and 90,000 of assembly work with 4-5 mobile cranes and 2 stationary cranes.

The both parties are advanced BIM users and utilize Tekla for modeling and creating element drawings, and work on their own but exchange models and elements. Strängbetong has developed tools to use with Tekla Structures to reduce manual labor.

 "We hardly ever model anything by hand, we search inserts and such from our database," says CAD & BIM Manager Tobias Svenberg from Strängbetong. "Our database contains all our standard items and we can use these to generate model in Tekla Structures. All inserts are made by generation routine. We use these to maintain modeling and information quality and reduce manual labor in modeling. The main benefit is the high model quality."

Ramboll benefits from the Tekla model in the design phase as they see when a certain element is needed for assembly. An element's journey is not finished when it has been fabricated. 

"Logistics at the busy Mall of Scandinavia site are challenging. For delivering the elements, the builders book a slot of time for their vehicles to arrive like planes landing an airport," says Peter Karlsson, Department Manager, Structural Engineering, from Ramboll.

Mall of Scandinavia is a true BIM project where several parties model. Read more about Strängbetong and Ramboll's work and the two previous parts of the story of the Mall.

Read more

Reinforcement may be a commodity, but the total cost of reinforcement for the builders not only includes the money paid for the steel, but also logistics and assembly. Celsa Steel Service wants to take this cost into account unlike most other companies in reinforcement manufacturing. The company chose a more active role in the customers' processes, understanding their needs and developing products and services that cut project duration and costs on site.

What does this added value mean for the customers in practice? When Celsa provided reinforcement for the two 8.7-kilometer railway tunnels in Hallandsåsen and their 19 connecting tunnels, Celsa's Tekla model saved the designer and builder Skanska-Vinci consortium a lot: thanks to the model, they could skip building a sample section of the collar on the cross tunnel and later demolishing it. Sounds like savings, doesn't it?

For Building Information Modeling, Celsa decided to choose Tekla Structures because of its flexibility and proven status as one of the best BIM tools for creating and managing concrete and reinforcement models. Also, they wanted to customize the software. They use Tekla to create 3D models from the consultants' drawings, do quality control, choose the products to use and illustrate tenders and solutions for customers and provide assembly instructions.

Celsa keeps developing its processes. With Tekla Structures and new applications, the company can provide digital receiving control service and allow reinforcement workers report assembly progress in real time. The progress can then be visualized in 3D to ease planning and gain project overview.

Read more

The three Cs of Tekla BIMsight, Combining models, Checking for conflicts and Communicating issues, go now further than before. Version 1.9 supports Trimble SketchUp models to improve the design coordination process and BIM collaboration. In addition to models from SketchUp, the new version also supports other formats (IGES and STEP) for more wide-ranging BIM collaboration.  

By supporting SketchUp (.skp) models, Tekla BIMsight 1.9 strengthens the links between two of the key software applications in the design-build-operate (DBO) portfolio offered by Trimble Buildings, Trimble group delivering technologies to help make the construction industry more productive by enhancing collaboration between all project stakeholders. 

The added support to file formats is not everything that is new with Tekla BIMsight 1.9. The new version also brings improvements for concrete professionals with rebar measurement and improved clash detection.

Also, the Tekla BIMsight is now more global than ever with five new languages: Korean, traditional Chinese, Dutch, Italian and Russian. The software has so far been available in English, German, French, Spanish, simplified Chinese and Japanese.

Tekla BIMsight Note is a free-of-charge, purpose-built tool for instant communication on-site and on the move. You can receive and reply to notes created in Tekla BIMsight with your mobile device. Now the app is available also for Android devices in addition to iOS.  

distributed by