Dive Brief:

• When Will Norton, a structural engineer at Dublin-based McElroy Consulting Engineers & Project Managers, brought Autodesk Revit and Fastrak's CSC design packages together in an information-sharing exercise in building information modeling, it wasn't to impress the client.
• With a 14,000-square-foot addition to create for global drug-maker Teva, the company wanted to see what benefits it could gain, and Norton used CSC's Integrator software to move information back and forth between designers and technicians.
• What McElroy found, Norton reported, is that the two views of the project were easily kept synchronized as inevitable design changes had to be made, and that meant not having to remodel the steel-frame building twice every time that happened.

Dive Insight:

As a small-to-medium sized firm, McElroy was not interested, and could not be, in adding hardware and software just to see if it helped. The company was persuaded by the Teva project, however, and it's using structural BIM on two more projects. The time saved in not re-modeling every change goes to the company's bottom line.