Should CADS make a full transition to Revit?

You’ll probably have gathered from previous posts that CADS is very keen to keep up-to-date with the newest technology. CADS Space Planning team are no exception. As a department we have recently been taking steps into investigating the use of Revit to deliver our projects. I’ve been challenged with investigating what benefits the use of the Revit programme would bring to the office and ultimately to our clients.

Having worked in-situ with a client recently it appeared that they had made a complete transition to Revit and that although the cross-over period had been a slow one, other programmes had eventually been completely phased out.

The question is should CADS make this full transition too? Or should we remain multi-software users, adding Revit to our arsenal to stay flexible in our market?

Given the nature of what we do, I think we’d be wrong to phase out our other planning tools completely, in favour of Revit. Our projects are led from the top through Architects and/or Trusts. They specify how the project is run and dictate what programmes and methods they require. As suppliers, CADS has to adhere to the requirements.

So there are a number of benefits of our working knowledge of multiple programmes, and on live projects this has meant that we are adaptable, able to understand the clients sometimes difficult requests, and can put a strategy into action using the full toolkit of AutoCAD, Micro station and Codebook in conjunction with each other.

In trying to meet a clients’ requests recently it actually proved useful in discovering that we could use a greater amount of codebook tools than previously thought on other projects, such as creating link code schedules and room labelling.

So, how should we be responding to the changing market place and the introduction of Revit? My recommendation is to carry on with what we’re doing – up-skilling team members to become advanced Revit users, without losing our existing expertise in the other tools. But will these tools eventually become redundant? What do you think?

Steven Ellis

C A Design Services