Tekla, Inc. and Innovaya, LLC. release Innovaya® Composer for Tekla Structures

Tekla, Inc. and Innovaya, LLC. have announced the release of Innovaya® Composer for Tekla Structures. As a result of connecting their Tekla Building Information Models (BIM) directly to their project estimates, construction professionals have the ability to develop dynamic project take-offs and estimates quickly and easily.

Winning the Work and Watching the Bottom Line

In today’s economic climate, construction companies must maintain a constant eye on the bottom line. With the number of project bids increasing to rarely seen levels and profits becoming increasingly elusive, cost controls more important than ever. As a result, basic square foot take-offs and unit costs are becoming a thing of the past. For BIM-enabled Contractors and Construction Managers, their appetite for automated BIM-based estimating from highly detailed models continues to grow rapidly.

“In today’s environment, by using an automated and efficient estimating process we can easily iterate through more alternatives to find value. With more detail in the estimate, there are simply more places for us to look for savings. After we win the work, we react to changes in the estimate in a precise and automated fashion and avoid losses related to incomplete change orders,” says Jason McFadden, Project Manager, Barton Malow Company. “We envision the estimator becoming a cost analyst limiting the tedious task of quantity take-offs.”
McFadden adds, “the use of Innovaya in our preconstruction department allows us to leverage relationships with A/E firms to better ‘build’ the model while streamlining our estimating efforts thus adding more value in the preconstruction phase of the project.”

How it Works

Innovaya® Composer for Tekla Structures connects highly detailed, information rich Tekla Structures Building Information Models (BIM) with Innovaya Visual Estimating using the Tekla Open API. For Contractors and Construction Managers, this means the ability to easily publish models to Innovaya Visual Estimating where costs can be applied to BIM-based quantity take-offs utilizing Innovaya’s tight integration with Microsoft Excel®, Timberline Estimating® and MC2®. This allows Contractors and Construction Managers to utilize the cost databases while automating the estimating process.

“One of our goals has always been to transfer as much intelligent BIM design data as possible to downstream applications such as estimating and scheduling” says Kevin Yu Ph.D., the President and Founder of Innovaya, LLC. Streamlining this process continues with the connection of the model to the estimate. Projects change and so do quantity take-offs and estimates. The integration between Tekla Structures and Innovaya Visual Estimating® allows users to see changes in the model visually and automatically change the project estimate accordingly bringing a high degree of efficiency to the change order process. Dr. Yu continues: “While one benefit is the dramatic increase of the efficiency in producing construction qualities and plans, the various new BIM-based estimating features in Innovaya software such as visual what-if cost analysis, automatic quantity and cost update for a design change, as well as side-by-side comparison of construction quantities and cost, really help cost estimators produce better estimates in a better and faster way. The new interface to support Tekla Structures increases the possibility for our customers to take the advantage of all these BIM-estimating features in their real world jobs.”

“Basic square foot take-offs and unit costs just don’t cut it any longer,” says Andy Dickey, Business Manager for Tekla North America’s Contractor Group. “Our users must have the ability to quickly obtain accurate project quantities, apply costs to them and react to changes. Further, our customers are seeking take-off and estimate granularity this is either impossible or extremely difficult using traditional 2D project information or traditional digitizing. This integration meets this need and working with Innovaya helps our customers become more efficient and effective.”