The Designer Group Case Study

Background

Mechanical and engineering contractors, Designer Group are industry leaders, working with some of the largest multi-national organisations in the world. Their vision is to build long standing relationships through collaboration to deliver innovative solutions for their clients in a rapidly changing industry. With offices in the UK, Ireland, Europe and most recently, the US, the company were looking for a way to facilitate collaboration between their employees, suppliers and clients, improving efficiency and productivity as a result.

The challenge

Designer Group has advocated Building Information Modelling (BIM) since 2010, recognising the benefits to business productivity and efficiency.
BIM enables Designer Group to explore, design, analyse and optimally sequence projects within a digital environment, releasing the opportunity to refabricate building elements in a safe and controlled environment. As part of the organisation’s initiative to remain innovative and listen to changing customer requirements, Joseph Mady, BIM / CAD Manager at Designer Group, started to look for creative solutions to improve cross-department collaboration across the business.

“I wanted a way to ensure collaboration throughout the company, streamlining communication and making Designer Group more efficient and effective as a result,” explains Mady, “a number of our projects involve re-working of digital models and we were looking to create an immersive environment that facilitated a more agile and collaborative way of working.”

Mady and his team conceptualised the ‘Electronic Visualisation Lab’ (EVL), a digital collaboration area that is the first of its kind in Ireland. The lab enables Designer Group to build projects virtually, allowing them to present concepts to clients to gain buy-in and sign off.

“Clients have become more educated on BIM and really understand how the technology can add value, not only to the construction but to the full life cycle of the building.”

The EVL enables staff, external consultants and clients to step inside the design and experience the result at a much earlier stage of the overall process, leading to improvements in project completion timelines and deeper project engagement overall.

The solution

The EVL brings together Avocor interactive displays with leading manufacturers in the CAD, BIM and Virtual Reality (VR) space such as Bluebeam and Autodesk.

“We knew that we wanted to have an interactive display solution within the EVL,” says Mady, “and we wanted the solution to meet the needs of our Business, Avocor did just that. One of the key things we loved about the display was the 4K screen resolution, we use Bluebeam collaboration software to drive our projects and the Avocor display worked perfectly with the software, really making the content on the screen stand out.”

One of the key benefits of the Avocor display is its interoperability, enabling users to switch seamlessly between applications, something which was vital for Designer Group who work with multiple software platforms.

“The touch capability of the Avocor display is really helping to enhance collaboration, increase engagement and ultimately improve overall productivity here at Designer Group. Users are enjoying the fact that they can easily mark-up drawings and annotations are clear and precise. Teams can review changes in real-time which reduces installation errors and speeds up project sign off which is fantastic.”

The future

“What we have achieved here at Designer Group with the Electronic Virtualisation Lab is an environment that several of our contractors are now looking to deploy within their own businesses as we move towards this approach being adopted as the standard across our industry. The Avocor display is a fundamental part of the solution, enhancing the user experience and bringing our software to life."