Walter P. Moore increases efficiency, accuracy, and design quality with Revit® Structure design and documentation software.

The Firm
Walter P. Moore is a leading national consulting engineering firm headquartered in Houston, Texas. “Our primary lines of business are structural and infrastructure engineering services,” says Jim Jacobi, CIO and principal. For 75 years, the firm’s talented engineers have pushed the envelope of what is possible—and won many awards, including the National Honor Award for Structural Engineering Excellence. “We believe in adopting technologies that have the potential to bring significant benefits to the project delivery process—and competitive advantage to our firm.” To meet this goal, Walter P. Moore has evaluated several different design technologies. “We were looking for the right technology to streamline our processes and improve overall design quality.”

New Opportunities
“We had five people throughout the firm take part in the beta testing for Revit Structure in early 2005,” says Jacobi. “They found out two things. One, Revit Structure has some very focused tools for structural engineers. And two, it is easy to use. The more we looked at it and the more we worked with it, the more impressed we were.”

New Projects
“Currently, we have 19 projects under way with Revit Structure,” says Jacobi. “The flagship project is definitely the Federal Courthouse in Jackson, Mississippi.” This 380,000-square-foot federal courthouse is seven stories high and has a $100- million price tag.

A New Way of Working
This project gave the firm the chance to realize some of the most important benefits the Revit platform offers. “When you have multidiscipline sets of drawings, it’s just not possible to totally collaborate and understand how everything fits together if everyone is using a different design platform,” says Jacobi. “But, on this project, the consultants are on the Revit platform.”

The Solution
Because Revit Structure seamlessly links to the models created in Revit® Architecture and AutoCAD® MEP software, the engineers and designers at Walter P. Moore were able to easily share information with the project architects H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture in New York, and the mechanical/electrical/plumbing (MEP) engineers.

Get Up and Running Fast
To get up to speed on Revit Structure as quickly as possible, Walter P. Moore enlisted the aid of Autodesk Consulting. The Quick Start provided several days of intensive process-based training, followed by mentoring and best-practice consulting with the team as they started their project. Following the training, “Autodesk Consulting spent a week helping us set up the project, assisting the engineers and designers with questions and issues that were specific to that project, which was very helpful,” says Jacobi.

Get More Done
The engineers quickly grasped how to use the software and were then able to reap the benefits of building information modeling. “As you build the physical model, the analytical model and documentation are created at the same time,” says Jacobi. Using a single building information model, Revit Structure integrates and coordinates structural design and documentation.

Revit Structure helped the firm analyze the building by linking to an analysis software package. “The ability to move between the physical model in Revit Structure and the analytical model is very important to our internal work processes,” says Jacobi.

Keep It Accurate
“Building information modeling significantly improves the quality and accuracy of the information that we push downstream,” says Jacobi. “Our construction documents are created directly from the model. If the model is correct, then the drawings are automatically correct. As a result, we’re able to spend a lot less time producing documentation and more time up front modeling the structure.”

Clearly Convey Design Intent
“Traditionally, we’ve tried to get across a lot of this information to the contractors and the trades using two-dimensional drawings,” says Jacobi. Revit Structure enables the project team to see the design evolve as a model. “The model is much more effective than 2D drawings.”

Catch Problems Early
Greater clarity also helps project teams discover design errors before construction begins. “The primary benefit is coordination,” says Joseph Ales Jr., Ph.D., P.E., a principal at Walter P. Moore who is heading up the 1-million-square-foot Brickell project, a high-rise office building in Miami, Florida. “Revit Structure helped us find issues that would have been very difficult to find using twodimensional drawings. Using other design tools, we probably wouldn’t have caught those errors until construction.”

The Result
“Everyone is really impressed with the progress on the Federal Courthouse project,” says Jacobi. “It’s currently in the later stages of design development.” They are equally impressed with Revit Structure. “We have over 30 engineers and designers trained on Revit Structure now, with more scheduled for training throughout the year. Our plan is total adoption of Revit Structure in our structural engineering service group by the end of 2006. We are committed to this approach and this technology because it’s going to produce better results for us, better results for our clients, and better results for the owners.”

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