Leveraging Technology for Real-Time Results

Specialty Contractor Redefines Field Communications with Revizto

When McCusker-Gill leadership recognized a disconnect between their design team and field installers, they turned to Revizto to streamline communication and improve data insights. By providing real-time access to the 3D model, 2D drawings and critical project data, Revizto has eliminated the need for workers to wait for answers or updates from the office. Empowering their field crews with visibility into real-time information has helped the company streamline the way they approach complex, high-profile projects, driving greater productivity and responsiveness.

About McCusker-Gill

Based in Hingham, Massachusetts, about 20 miles south of downtown Boston, McCusker-Gill is a second-generation straight-line HVAC/sheet metal subcontractor. Its services range from preconstruction, including BIM/VDC and design assist, to sheet metal fabrication, offsite prefabrication, field installation and project close out. The company self-performs the fabrication of all of its ductwork at its main 60,000 sq-ft facility and a 30,000 sq-ft prefabrication facility. McCusker-Gill has worked on notable projects including Brigham & Women’s Building for Transformative Medicine, Boston University’s Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering, and Encore Boston Harbor, which had over one million pounds of ductwork and was one of the largest sheet metal projects completed in the Greater Boston area. The company is the 2023 SMACNA Contractor of the Year.

Field Focused with Visibility, Interoperability

One of the biggest challenges for specialty contractors in the HVAC/sheet metal industry has long been coordination between design and the field, even in the advancing BIM/VDC ecosystem.

For McCusker-Gill, resolving this disconnect is all about listening. Kevin Gill, Jr., President of McCusker-Gill, confirms, “Our philosophy, and key reason for our leadership in the industry, is that we always look for ways to be more efficient in the way we design, fabricate and install systems. Gaining efficiency requires that we listen to our skilled team. It's really important that they feel heard.”

For instance, through town hall-style meetings, foremen have an opportunity to spotlight workflow challenges. “In one of these meetings, field leadership stated a need for more information in the field; there was too much delay between design and production which led to downtime and delays as field crews had to wait for information, drawings or answers from the office staff,” explains Gill. “They would have to take screenshots, send emails, or make phone calls to resolve problems. It was highly inefficient.”

Leadership realized that giving them access to something like Revit wouldn’t work as these individuals are skilled tradespeople, not BIM experts. However, Gill and his team recalled seeing Revizto on a previous project, where a general contractor used it to communicate model changes in the field.

One concern was the integration of the company’s core sheet metal software, STRATUS, with Revizto. McCusker-Gill uses STRATUS to manage its entire workflow, from initial planning and spooling through fabrication, prefabrication, and field assemblies.

A typical Revizto-enabled project begins with the BIM/VDC team publishing a Revit sheet metal model into STRATUS. From there, the foreman is able to develop the pre-fabrication assemblies in STRATUS, which is fed directly into the shop prefabrication department. Those assemblies are published to Revizto.

The ability to leverage STRATUS property data in Revizto allows the project team to help field teams easily identify spools or packages and track status by selecting objects, searching on property details, or by applying appearance profiles. This visibility ensures better understanding about the project as a whole.

On the jobsite, foreman and field crews have access to the model via rugged data vaults such as the KNAACK Field Station job box, which includes a mobile workstation. These desks-in-a-box are equipped with STRATUS, Autodesk BIM 360 Docs which stores project documents, including submittals, shop drawings, and contract drawings, and Revizto.

With Revizto, project teams in the office, on the prefab floor, or in the field have access to all the necessary information, including the 3D model, 2D drawings, and critical annotations, reducing downtime and improving productivity.

Intuitive Interface and User Friendly Features

• Rooms

  One of the highly popular tools in Revizto is the Rooms tool that allows users to quickly navigate to a specific place in the model. In the past, office staff or field crews might have had to search through a model to find a particular area of concern. Rooms are not displayed in other model coordination tools that the company has used in the past. Gill says, “With Revizto, they get to a room with a click. It seems like a small thing, but it’s a huge time saver and our foremen really like it."

• Issue Tracker

  In the past, foremen kept a running checklist that was often tracked on paper or in a spreadsheet. Things got missed or forgotten. With Revizto’s Issue Tracker, field crews can easily flag and track issues or conflicts in the model. It provides a centralized, organized way to document and address problems quickly, improving the overall quality of the work.

  Gill believes that the correspondence between the field and the BIM team is much more efficient because they're not taking pictures and screenshots and sending emails back and forth. It’s also been valuable from a quality control standpoint.

• Section Cut

  The Section cut feature in Revizto is purpose-built to help non-technical users quickly cut sections (or boxes) within a 3D model. “We call it the "plunger" tool. It allows field crews to view the model with a level of ease that was not previously available to them. There’s nothing like this in other tools that we’ve used,” Gill explained.

• 2D Overlay

  The ability to overlay the 2D shop drawings and contract drawings on the 3D model, with all the critical information like crane pick numbers, duct sizes, and riser locations, is another very handy tool for the McCusker-Gill project teams.

A Strategic Rollout

Since investing in Revizto, McCusker-Gill has taken a strategic approach to rolling out the technology, ensuring project teams are trained and comfortable using Revizto before deploying it on projects.

“It’s a selective, training-focused approach that is working well for us. We now have foremen who have used Revizto on several projects and they’ve become champions for the tool. They are essential to onboarding new teams, as their feedback carries more weight than if we just gave them the tool and asked them to use it.” – Kevin Gill, Jr., President, McCusker-Gill.

Through Revizto, the BIM/VDC team can also track every project that's running through the shop. At any given time, there could be 30 or 40 projects, some of them with hundreds or even thousands of packages.

The benefits are particularly visible on large projects.