Bryan Construction is a leader in the Colorado construction industry with a growing presence nationally, as well as at US military bases across the world. They have headquarters in Colorado Springs with several other regional offices.
One thing that helps Bryan stay ahead of their competition is their adoption of technology and their standardization of its use. This is apparent in the way they’ve used Bluebeam Revu over the years.
Scott Robertson, a project manager who is currently chair of Bryan’s Technology Committee (more on that here), recalls the days when the company was just getting started with Revu—it happened to coincide with his first days at the company, too, after graduating from the Colorado State School of Construction Management. As an intern at Bryan, he had been literally pasting corrections and markups onto drawing sheets—RFIs and such. Just a few months later, Revu was rolled out to project engineers like him: they were excited about hyperlinking and being able to update their drawings in once place.
The influence of Revu within Bryan spread quickly, and soon the company was using it not only for their drawing editing, but also for document management and as a collaboration tool. Robertson took a leading role in facilitating widespread adoption across the company, by designing and implementing standardized processes and by creating tutorials specific to his company’s needs.
Consistency is the greatest ally of efficiency
Early on, the company standardized folder structure in Bluebeam Studio, the anywhere, anytime collaboration capability for communication and document management in Revu. They organized folders in a way that made the most sense to them, so that on every single project, the folder organization—which is really another way of saying data organization, or data management—was identical. This had several benefits. One, an engineer from one office could immediately jump into a project another office was working on. Two, even after project handover, anybody with access could jump into an archived Studio Session and easily locate relevant information. And three, it made onboarding new hires easier because they didn’t have to learn several different organizational systems—say, one for this manager, a different system for that manager, etc. There was one file structure across the entire Bryan organization, past, present and future. “Whether you open up Bluebeam Studio here in Springs or in Fort Collins, we all use the same file structure,” Robertson said.
Doug Woody, construction executive at Bryan, has been a big advocate of Revu at the company and believes the payoff has been great. It has allowed his growing company to remain one of the top GCs in the region, with a growing influence. “We’re always finding different ways that we can utilize Bluebeam. We use it for markups, site logistics plans, dimension drawings, mock-ups, as-builts, you name it, we do everything in Revu.”
