Good Connections Magazine

G O O D CO N N E C T I O N S | S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 3 R aney Construction Inc. is a shell-framing contractor and component fabricator serving the central Florida market and single-family homebuilders. The company offers trusses and wall panels to builders on the jobs that it frames, as well as concrete and CMU blocks from Raney-owned Raney Components and Raney Building Materials. Providing integrated field solutions is a key to Raney's success. Owner Buddy Raney explains that with the Florida housing market recovering, he needed an effective way to increase the number of homes he can frame every year to keep up with customer demand while growing his business. But he wanted to do this in a way that increased the efficiency and throughput of the current staff, rather than simply hiring more people. Raney linked the Instinct Residential Design System from ITW Building Components Group with Pipeline from CG Visions and WMS from BuilderMT to solve the challenge. Utilizing the Instinct process, Raney has been able to design a single BIM (Building Information Modeling) module with the options available in Instinct's VisionREZ software, relying on it for functions ranging from estimating and design of truss and wall panels to purchasing and invoicing. With the Instinct technology, Raney has been able to remove design and estimating bottlenecks. The company has accom- plished this by building the information into the BIM model once and accessing, reusing and repurposing that data for similar jobs. "By this time next year, I'll be able to increase from building 2,700 homes to around 3,500 homes without any real manpower addition," said Raney. "That's a huge increase in capacity for my business." Being able to incorporate the truss and wall panel framing and designs into the BIM model has reduced the time it takes to design jobs, since Raney Construction starts from an existing model. In addition, utilizing a single framed model for all systems greatly reduces potentially costly errors. "Because we now provide estimates from an actual 3D BIM model rather than 2D documents, our estimates are more accurate, as well as easier and faster to complete," said Raney. "The vast majority of the estimate is imported directly from the BIM model, so the estimator simply needs to finish it out within the Pipeline software and send the completed estimate into BuilderMT." With these efficiency gains and increased capacity throughout the design process, Raney Construction has made only modest staff additions to substantially increase the number of homes the firm can estimate, design and frame. n Building Information Modeling (BIM) Sparks Productivity and Growth for Florida Business Strong Instincts " The Instinct process enables us to better manage so many facets of our business in a much more accurate manner. That's good for us and good for our customers." Buddy Raney, Owner, Raney Construction Inc. CUSTOMER PROFILE: RANEY CONSTRUCTION INC. The efficiency of the Building Information Modeling process enables Raney Construction to reduce design time and errors while providing faster, more accurate estimates.

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