[meekaaku]

I have some ideas I believe that, if done well, will be transformative:

Problem 1: Architecture/Engineering is still very much traditional. Various distributed teams across cities/countries email CAD (mostly autocad) files back and forth or host it in cloud, with changes highlighted in revision clouds. The delivery of final design involved the interplay of specialisted teams, architecture/structure/M&E/QS/Civl/Onsite etc. Lack of proper tools cause problems in synchronising and keeping everyone uptodate with all the changes, error prone and its extremely manual. This becomes evenmore important when the actual construction is going on and you need to keep track of ammendments etc. A simple architectural change (eg moving a door), need to be reflected in structure/m&e all drawings, possiblly reworking internal wiring etc.

They (I dont mean everyone, but most of the industry) have never seen how distributed teams of programmers use version control software to sync/branch/diff/merge work from multiple teams.

Solution: A tool that can seemlessly do diff/merge/branch of CAD drawings (perhaps integrated into AutoCAD or other CADs itself) will bring a lot of efficiency into architecture/engineering field. Lead Architect could have his team working on various parts of the design/experimental ideas (think feature branches), which he merges to his tree. Engineering team will pull from Lead Architect. M&E team can pull from both these teams etc (this is similar to Linus trusted leutinent model). The idea is NOT to change how they organise their team or automate everything, but provide tools to help the human to make things more efficient.

As far as I know OnShape are the only people working on such a thing and that is 3D. Most arch/eng is still 2D. Autodesk themselves have Revit but I am not sure of to what extent it does all these.

[meekaaku]

Problem 2: It is very manaul and error prone to prepare Bill of Quantities/Materials in arch/engineering sector. Most firms rely on Excel. Once the data has been put in excel, there is no way to split/sort/question about the data. You cannot for example generate material bill for all 2nd floor electrical works, or say get me all reinforcement details for foundation.

Solution: Preferably a cloud based quantity take-off software that can read/mark cad/pdf files. Once the data has been input (manually or otherwise), it should be able to generate various reports (or presentation bills) based on what is being asked,(see questions above).

The only cloud based one I know is Stack[0]

[0] https://www.stackct.com/

[homedepotdave]

I assume you're in this industry? If you'd be potentially interested in partnering, I'd be interested in learning more. You could shoot me an email at [e-mail]