How owners can use PlanGrid in design
During the design phase, owners make a series of pivotal decisions involving quality, cost, and scope. These decisions often require input (or approval) from multiple teams, including end users, company planners, facilities teams, designers, and engineers. As drawings evolve, it’s essential that owners have everything at their fingertips so they can make fast, informed decisions.
PlanGrid helps owners and developers track budgets, resolve early issues, and offer quick feedback throughout the design and planning process. A simple, collaborative platform for viewing, sharing, and approving decisions, PlanGrid minimizes the need for meetings and coordination typically required in this process.
Tracking scope changes during design
Since drawings are revised so frequently during the design phase, it can be tricky for project teams to keep up with what’s changed and how it impacts the scope of the project. PlanGrid provides project teams with a quick way to track changes affecting scope, and ultimately, the project’s budget.
PlanGrid’s auto-versioning feature makes sure that anytime a sheet revision is uploaded, it’s automatically leafed on top of all past versions and stays in order—with any conversations or markups kept in place. Sheet compare allows you to overlay two sheets (as different colors) to spot changes at a glance.
If the design team collects all their sheet revisions in PlanGrid — from programming to the construction set — the owner can easily review changes on the fly by looking at the revision history. This is a great way for owners to pinpoint what changes are affecting the budget.
Identifying costly issues early
It’s easy for designers to miss small details in drawings when they’re being made across different disciplines and this often results in drawings not being fully coordinated leading into construction. Details overlooked in design can easily lead to change orders in construction and, ultimately, more cost to owners.
PlanGrid empowers design teams to minimize coordination misses using the sheet compare feature — easily overlay HVAC plans and lighting plans, for example, to ensure light fixtures and diffusers are clear of one another. When well-coordinated drawings are turned over, owners don’t have to worry about opening themselves up to more change orders or surprise costs.
These are just some of the ways PlanGrid minimizes traditional design-bid-build issues, and incorporates earlier clash detection and constructability reviews for contractors during design-build and Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) projects.
Quick feedback to design teams
During planning, bidding, and early design, owners are constantly meeting with stakeholders to provide feedback and help evolve the drawings. PlanGrid was built to deliver on the need for fast, real-time collaboration on a living set of drawings—from anywhere.
Markup tools allow you to handwrite or type notes, highlight items, and add photos. Drop a stamp right into your plans and assign an owner to complete a certain task. Point people to exactly what you’re seeing with a snapshot: a screenshot with added context in an email. Everything is easy to navigate thanks to PlanGrid’s OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, which automatically hyperlinks callouts and sheet names. Anyone, even people unfamiliar with construction drawings, can navigate the set more easily by simply tapping into hyperlinks right on the sheet.
There are a number of ways to stay organized, collaborate, track changes, and get ahead of issues during design, and PlanGrid does them all.
Matt Hoey (Senior Project Coordinator at Marx Okubo) says it best: “As a third party consultant acting as an Owner’s Rep on multiple jobs, it blows my mind that we have actually performed this role for so many years without the instant and unfettered field access to all drawings, specifications, RFIs, and issues that PlanGrid provides.”
This is the second in a series of 5 blog posts about how owners and developers use PlanGrid throughout a building’s lifecycle. Read more:
How PlanGrid is game-changing for owners and developers
Construction with PlanGrid: for owners
Closeout with PlanGrid: for owners
Operations with PlanGrid: for owners
About the author: Josh is a Customer Success Manager at PlanGrid, based out of Philadelphia. He joined PlanGrid after working for 6+ years in the construction industry at an ENR Top 400 General Contractor. You can reach him at josh.progar@plangrid.com or on LinkedIn.
