Over the past 18 months, our sister division, RCMS Group, has conducted strategic planning discussions with many of its clients, partners and analysts with the goal of attaining visibility into both specific markets and business concerns.

Given how closely their BIM services dovetail with productivity, efficiency and workflow in their customers’ businesses, RCMS executives have a unique point of view into architectural firms and how they run their businesses.

Through their ongoing study, they uncovered key commonalities and gleaned insights into how successful architectural firms plan on managing the near future and published their findings in a whitepaper available from their website. (Download the white paper here.)

The key strategies described are all driven by the measurement of costs and flexibility applicable to your own business model. These strategies require little investment of capital, but rather an investment of management’s time and consideration. Firms that are employing these strategies have built businesses that can either take advantage of hyper-growth, or significantly reduce their risks during a stalled economy.

RCMS gathers data from  its clients across a wide spectrum of architectural segments, including large government agencies, commercial developers of all kinds, institutional owners and project managers, as well as a healthy portfolio of industry specific architects in healthcare, education, retail, and residential.

The whitepaper (link) boils their findings down to 10 key strategies to help architectural firms not only weather recent economic storms, but position themselves for growth and opportunity when the market recovers.

The 10 Strategies are as follows:

1.    Focusing on core business competency
2.    Understanding the success-drivers to a firm’s cost and operating model
3.    Aligning vendors with costs and service delivery
4.    Shifting capital intensive IT deployments to “on-demand” services
5.    Understanding prospects by project backlog and building type
6.    Partnering for scale and specialty
7.    Attempting to better-understand unresponsive clients
8.    Benchmarking and tracking core productivity metrics
9.    Crafting compensation plans to drive firm goals
10.    Ranking, stacking and cross-training employees

(Download the white paper here.)

RCMS provides three- dimensional modeling and analysis of construction projects on an outsourced basis to AEC clients throughout the industry. Deeply embedded in the practical evolution of BIM, and relied on for expert opinion, RCMS provides a valuable point of view on managing projects and business practices to reduce risk for design and construction firms, and create more efficient and more competitive organizations.

Looking for more in-depth information on how partnering with technology service providers can improve your business? Contact us to learn more!

To get more details, click on the links below:

• PlanWell DataBridge is a new data transfer tool being used to synchronize documents and contact lists between PlanWell Enterprise planrooms and Meridian’s Prolog project management tool
• Our Abacus print cost recovery tool recently went through some significant upgrades that can help you capture more reimbursable revenue, or at the very least, manage your printing costs more effectively.
• Sub-Hub, our web-based planroom and bid notification tool also got a lift in several key areas that makes this self-managed construction document management tool even more…well, manageable.
• If your work requires reprographics products and services to be used in far-off places, business in Shanghai just got a lot easier with our new sister company there called Shanghai UNIS Printing Technology.
• ARC, the parent company of more than 40 different reprographic company brands all over North America, also made its first foray into the BIM space acquiring RCMS, an Atlanta-based consultancy practice that creates building information models on an outsourced basis for a variety of purposes and clients, all from two-dimensional plans.

Finally, we’re not the only ones moving and shaking these days. For those of you keeping track of the digital printing market, Canon announced their intention to purchase Océ in the near future, and Océ appears to be embracing the offer. We’ll let you know more about the deal as we learn about it ourselves.

In mid-October, our parent company, ARC, announced a corporate addition of a highly-respected technology services provider in the building information modeling (BIM) market. Atlanta-based RCMS specializes in using conventional two-dimensional construction drawings to provide three-dimensional modeling and analysis of commercial construction projects on an outsourced basis. The firm focuses on improving business processes for construction professionals in every segment of the AEC industry.

Not sure what BIM is?

It involves the use of specialized software and analytical expertise to represent buildings and building components in three dimensions on a computer screen. BIM users build their projects “virtually” in a computer model prior to actual construction to increase the accuracy and speed of bidding, plan the workflow of a job, project costs and schedules, and identifying conflicts long before they are encountered in the field.

Given the recent adoption of BIM as a requirement for GSA and other government projects, not to mention a growing number of private projects, the need for BIM is growing quickly. But purchasing the software and hardware require to run it, and learning to use the software applications and analytical packages are often major obstacles to its use.

“Using BIM is becoming a necessity in construction” said K.P. Reddy, ARC’s Vice President of BIM Services . “By offering an outsourced BIM solution, we can dramatically reduce costs, while delivering critical decision support data, risk mitigation, and building process improvement that come from using the technology. For a customers who prefer managing project-based costs as opposed to adding overhead and infrastructure to their business, it’s an ideal way to amortize the adoption of BIM.”

Curious to know more about how we might be able to bring BIM to bear on your projects? Ask your sales rep for more information, or contact us here.