Canada’s Leading (VDC) Man: EllisDon’s Hammad Chaudhry

Hammad is currently the Director of Virtual Design & Construction responsible for EllisDon’s Civil and ICI projects in Western Canada. With nearly a decade of experience in the Architectural and Construction industry, he has worked in a wide range of capacities from design consulting to construction management.

For 70 years, EllisDon, an employee-owned, $5 billion-a-year construction services company has continued to grow exponentially beyond its modest origins in London, Ontario. With over 5,000 salaried and hourly employees across fifteen national and international offices, EllisDon has become a leader in every sector and nearly every facet of the construction industry. 

Hammad has championed various positions including Architectural Technologist, Project Coordinator, Building Information Modeling (BIM) Coordinator, and Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) Manager. Working with BIM and digital workflows on projects, Hammad’s role is to implement VDC tools to provide the necessary balance between technology, innovation and economic efficiency. Hammad strives to implement technology to offer appropriate and novel solutions to construction problems. 

With Hammad’s expertise in the virtual design and construction space, we couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say about his experience with Revizto.

The complex process of creating an efficient BIM tracking process.

As the VDC Director, Hammad has to efficiently manage across project teams. With the amount of data and models being passed around and updated, his job plays a key role in overall project efficiency and whether or not a project hits deadlines and budgets. Projects are continuously becoming more complex, and the industry continues to get saturated with technology.

Navigating design models across software platforms is becoming a more complicated endeavor by the day. As someone with such in-depth experience across industry software solutions, we wanted to pick his brain, so we asked him about some challenges he faced prior to using Revizto. Here is what he had to say.

Hammad’s Top Three Pre-Revizto Challenges

1. Hard to give everyone access to the model
2. Complex BIM issue tracking process
3. 2D/3D overlay for comparisons

A tablet in the field is worth more than two computers in the office.

Expanding and democratizing models access enables more people to be on the same page. With design versioning and documentation flowing across teams and locations, driving accountability becomes a challenge when people are not viewing the most up-to-date information. With Revizto, teams can centrally manage files in a single source of truth for teams to view real-time models, streamlining issue tracking and simplifying reporting. By leveraging Revizto as his Integrated Collaboration Platform (ICP), Sam was able to minimize these as well as some other big challenges – here is what he had to say:

Hammad’s Top 5 with Revizto 5:

1. Mobile or Desktop Model Access
2. Issue Tracking with reporting functions
3. Non-VDC users leveraging Revizto more than Navisworks
4. 2D/3D Overlay
5. Built-in VR

“Revizto is a top-notch team that has really tried to go above and beyond for everyone in our group. It reduces the fear of using the model (vs traditional) and can drive further collaboration which ultimately helps reduce resources.

Hammad Chaudhry

Director of Virtual Design & Construction Western Canada

EllisDon

For more about EllisDon, visit EllisDon.com