Vinic Surveying Services has been on a digital transformation journey and is sharing its new-found expertise with clients.
For many years, the workflows of quantity surveyors relied on paper drawings, spreadsheets and manual processes. These methods are time-consuming and prone to error, especially on large housing projects involving thousands of data points and multiple revisions.
Since 2005, Vince French has provided quantity surveying services for some of the UK’s largest housebuilders, with sites ranging from 100 to 6,500 homes.
His firm, Vinic Surveying Services, has used Bluebeam for eight years and over time, he’s transitioned from practitioner to provider of bespoke training courses, enabling others to benefit from his expertise.
French uses Bluebeam Revu and Excel to standardise, automate and simplify his workflow, which has saved the company a substantial amount of time.
“On one project, I was looking at 60 bending schedules to calculate the reinforcements required for foundations. Before switching to Bluebeam, this would have taken a day and a half.”
95% time saving
“On one project, I was looking at 60 bending schedules to calculate the reinforcements required for foundations,” French says. “Before switching to Bluebeam, I would have used a spreadsheet and manually entered each line. With thousands of lines of data, this would have taken a day and a half. But with Bluebeam, I can combine all those documents, export directly to Excel and have all the information I need in about 15 minutes. This is more than a 95% time saving on the manual way.”
Projects typically involve multiple revisions and, with digital tools, these are quickly and easily managed. French says: “I can copy the markups from the old version, put them onto the new and then just adapt where needed – it saves so much time.
“With big site layouts, managing revisions by comparing printed drawings and trying to see the changes was previously very difficult. With Bluebeam, it’s very quick and easy as you can digitally overlay the new version.
“A revision job that previously took an hour, where there was a risk of potentially not picking up every change, now takes a couple of minutes. And with Bluebeam’s AI feature, this can be reduced to just 15 seconds.”
From paper to digital
Previously, the work was done manually, using printed plans and manual measurements. As French started working on larger and more complex jobs, the volume of paper and the cost of printing became unmanageable. He looked for digital tools to help.
“We started looking at digital measuring packages as we were getting fed up with measuring by hand, and there had to be a better way of doing things. After trying a couple of others, I came across Bluebeam. We picked it up quickly, and it was great.
“Previously, when we were measuring groundworks, many site layouts were over three or four drawings, maybe more. And if we wanted to create a master layout, we’d have to print separate drawings and literally cut them and stick them together.
“If revisions to the drawings came in, even with some other software programmes, we would then have to start again from scratch.”
Bespoke training
Having built substantial expertise in using Bluebeam within his own business, French now offers training courses to help others use the software.
Edd Randell, QS and technical manager at specialist in groundworks and civil engineering Foxdown Construction, explains how the training with French has enabled them to improve accuracy and reduce risk. “We’ve had in-depth training from Vince and that’s given us the confidence to use Bluebeam to its full potential. It has everything that I need, it’s really efficient to use, and it’s easy to make changes and correct any issues or mistakes.
“It’s much easier to accurately measure jobs for clients. It massively helps to reduce risk because we know that our pricing for the job is right – we can see exactly what has been measured and we know that it is accurate.”
Ease of use is key
Foxdown MD Dave Hiscock explains how Bluebeam has helped them to improve consistency and efficiency: “I was sceptical at first about the impact that Bluebeam would have. When you’re small, it’s important to have something that’s easy to use and can help you achieve consistency across the project. Bluebeam helps with that. The team can all use it, recognise the way that we mark up documents and work consistently. It helps us to manage projects more efficiently and effectively.
“Time is money, and we work in an industry where margins are tight. The more efficient that we can be, the better.”
Reflecting on the wider benefits of digital transformation, French says: “Timescales to return tenders are very tight these days, so speeding up the process means we can respond much faster. Moreover, the level of detail and accuracy we have with Bluebeam gives us much more confidence in what we’re producing.”
By combining accuracy with efficiency, digital tools are helping surveyors like French – and the firms he now trains – to stay competitive.
