Connected Structural Group Goes Big with BIM

CSG increases efficiency and productivity with three Nemetschek solutions.

Nemetschek Group has sponsored this post.
(Image courtesy of CSG.)

(Image courtesy of CSG.)

James Warner, founder and principal of Connected Structural Group (CSG) realized the benefits of design technology early on when the company started using building information modeling (BIM) software 15 years ago. When it comes to Vegas, you’ve got to think big—and that’s what Warner did.

Initially, Warner and his partner were involved heavily in casino design at another structural design firm, but he branched out to start CSG whose projects range from casinos, airports, hospitals, campuses and other facilities, primarily on the west coast.

While in the Air Force, Warner was stationed in Las Vegas, Nevada where he studied structural engineering at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Fast-forward to 25 years later, and he’s still in Las Vegas where CSG is based. Warner has more than 19 years of design experience and expertise in high-rise, complex structures. Currently, Warner focuses on BIM development and structural design modeling.

The company also has an engineering division, Connected Structural Engineers (CSE). All of the projects designed by CSG and CSE use BIM for cost estimations, simulations, scheduling, energy analysis, structural design, GIS integration, fabrication, erection and facilities management.

The engineering division CSE primarily focused on the Vegas area, including projects on the Monte Carlo, Sands Expo and UHS Henderson Hospital—with some exceptions, such as Shanghai Disneyland Park.

Engineering.com virtually met with James Warner from CSG and Matt Wheelis, VP Industry Strategy Build & Construct Division at the Nemetschek Group, to discuss why CSG trusts in three Nemetschek Group products on 90 percent of its projects for design and fabrication processes, and how Nemetschek is helping customers such as CSG increase efficiency and deliver better results.

Wheelis joined Nemetschek in the fall of 2020 and has over 20 years of industry experience under his belt—from the construction field to the software side. Wheelis, now based in Atlanta, Georgia, has a master’s in civil engineering from Texas A&M, and has held many roles in the building and construction software industry for companies such as Autodesk and Leica Geosystems.

Left: James Warner, founder and principal of Connected Structural Group. Right: Matt Wheelis, VP Industry Strategy Build & Construct Division at Nemetschek Group.

Left: James Warner, founder and principal of Connected Structural Group. Right: Matt Wheelis, VP Industry Strategy Build & Construct Division at Nemetschek Group.

When asked about his company philosophy, Warner replied, “We lean on technology. When we got into steel detailing, we knew we were getting into a field that took a lot of manpower. At the time, larger firms were pretty much all using AutoCAD and hand drafting and the technology reduced the manpower. It made it more competitive for smaller groups to get involved in it, utilizing the technology and taking advantage of all the shortcuts leading to less resources required.”

Adding to that, he said: “We are very customer focused, always finding ways to make the project better.” CSG started using SDS2 from the very beginning of the company in 2006. “At the time everyone was moving to 3D modeling. It was obvious that this was the future,” said Warner.

“We looked at different solutions and realized we needed something that is very useable—down to the fabrication level, not just the design level. We chose SDS as opposed to Revit, so that we could use it for design and fabrication.”

That was 15 years ago. In addition, Warner has been using Nemetschek’s RISA engineering software for 20 years and Bluebeam collaboration software for 10 years.

To gain a better understanding of how these products work—and better yet, how they help the company and its customers, James broke down the workflow for each solution. Every project starts with SDS2 as the model base. SDS2 is used for 80 percent of CSG’s steel detailing and 20 percent pure structural design from the ground up, according to Warner.

SDS2 is used for steel connection design, Steel Shop drawings, BIM coordination and CNC files. (Image courtesy of CSG.)

SDS2 is used for steel connection design, Steel Shop drawings, BIM coordination and CNC files. (Image courtesy of CSG.)

From there shop drawings go into a PDF, and that’s where Bluebeam comes in. Bluebeam is used for collaboration both in and out of the office. Before they started to use Bluebeam, Warner said CSG’s process was problematic, because they were prone to losing track of the document once that it was sent around the office for checking and redlining, and so they’d have to go back and look at it, depending on with whom and where it ended up.

“Bluebeam takes that away, where everyone sees the markups and who has picked up that markup,” he said. “And then it can be back-checked.”

RISA, in addition, is used for pure design and erection engineering. “When we start in SDS2, we pull our SDS2 model into RISA and do erection procedure engineering, and take the designer‘s model and provide the erection engineering for that. To do that, we get the information out of SDS2 and then apply the loads to the structure,” Warner explained. He added that the technology also helps with seismic winds when dealing with structures; tall structures, in particular, would take months to analyze without specialized software.

The fact that CSG has been using the Nemetschek products for at least a decade each says a lot in itself. Regarding ease of use, Warner highlighted that Bluebeam is extremely simple to use and so it was quite easy to get his team trained on it and productive. Just like with any software, the more you know about it the more you use, he said. RISA is also simple and intuitive to pick up, Warner added.

RISA is used to analyze the structure during construction for erection sequencing, temporary loading, stability and deflection. (Image courtesy of CSG.)

RISA is used to analyze the structure during construction for erection sequencing, temporary loading, stability and deflection. (Image courtesy of CSG.)

SDS2, on the other hand, is not as simple because there is so much to it. According to Warner, it can take some time to learn all the functions, but once you get the hang of it SDS2 becomes more natural to the user.

At the moment, CSG utilizes mainly Nemetschek’s online training for all three products—a process that works out well for CSG. “Nemetschek is known for being close to its customers and the SDS2 support center was always prompt at getting back and supporting us getting new products up and running,” Warner said. “We also used to go to the SDS2 headquarters in Nebraska, but at the moment, due to the pandemic, we obviously mainly take advantage of online training.”

To connect the dots between Nebraska and Germany: the Nemetschek Group is based in Munich, Germany, but acquired Design Data Corporation, maker of SDS2, in 2016. RISA and Bluebeam were also added to the Nemetschek portfolio in 2017 and 2014, respectively. While Nemetschek’s initial product was ALLPLAN, the company has expanded significantly across markets and industry segments, adding other brands such as Graphisoft and Vectorworks but also facility management software experts Spacewell, in the meantime offering solutions that cover the complete building lifecycle.

Aside from the mentioned Nemetschek products, CSG also uses solutions such as Bentley System’s RAM Steel and Autodesk’s Navisworks. This, of course, means that integration capabilities between these software products is of the utmost importance.

“CSG rarely dictates what software is used on a project, so we appreciate interoperability across widely-used industry products,” Warner said. SDS2, for instance, has a plug-in he is fond of that enables CSG to work with Revit files and get the data they need out of it.

However, Warner admits that he would like to see some integration enhancements among the Nemetschek solutions he uses. For instance, embedding Bluebeam into SDS2 as a function would be helpful for his team as he doesn’t want to train his engineers or architects on SDS2, since Bluebeam is the most commonly used communication tool for PDFs.

“From a structural engineering standpoint, I don’t think there is anything better than to be able to create a design that is not just for the building department, but is actually for the end product,” said Warner.

Asked to chime in about what Nemetschek has in the works that Warner and other structural engineering customers would be interested in, Wheelis, who joined Nemetschek last fall, responded that one of the things the company is particularly working on is indeed integration improvements within their own portfolio. “We are working to make better collaboration between our brands.  The efforts between SDS2 and Bluebeam are just one example,” said Wheelis.

He continued, “Nemetschek’s industry strategy for the building and construction division is all about helping us drive toward a more integrated portfolio of products. However, this does not mean that we are not looking for what made us strong in the past – complementing our portfolio through additional acquisitions if they are a great fit.”

Wheelis comes from a construction design and construction technology world. “I started in the field as a project engineer, doing estimating, submittals and RFIs. I’ve lived the manual side, and I also spent 20 years now driving toward digitalization. My goal is to take all of this learning from project management systems to BIM for construction to geospatial positioning and help Nemetschek to improve the way these workflows are integrated together,” he says.

Building on that, part of his new role is to help foster collaboration across Nemetschek’s brands; not only within the building division, but also with their other BIM products. He said there are different parts of the world where Nemetschek’s BIM products such as Graphisoft Archicad are more widely used, which gives Nemetschek the strength to bring its construction products closer in line to its design products.

“Another thing I would say that’s been great to see on the SDS2 team is they are looking at the way project mixes are changing,” Wheelis says. “As you can imagine, the past year’s major players who are building data centers, factories for manufacturing of electric vehicles or warehouses driven by ecommerce players which are popping up —all of that drives what goes into the software. We learn about this by understanding what our customers are working on and the kind of challenges that are presented by the unique needs of their customers.”

He pointed out some of the features in SDS2’S latest release and how these address the types of facilities mentioned above, including enhanced tube column and joist connections. When asked what he’s seeing in the structural engineering industry that technology can help with, Wheelis replied, “It’s one of the things James touched on a little bit. The rate of change happening on a project is intense. People need help with integrating that change and the ability to collaborate more quickly.”

Wheelis also discussed more specifics on Nemetschek’s customers and how the company is addressing their needs by enhancing software functionality in its products. For instance, with more people working remotely these days—especially during the pandemic—the need for real-time workflows that enable more real-time collaboration has been important. “One of the newest things is the idea of having the ability to have other people comment on a model in the 3D space while the detailer is in SDS2 using some of the SDS2 cloud integrations while working live and remotely,” explained Wheelis.

Real-time collaboration is also a key feature of Bluebeam. Wheelis added that with Bluebeam’s Studio product, users can collaborate in real-time where everyone can see the markups in the desktop version that are transmitted through the cloud, between the various people in that session. Users can also see all the comments people are making, along with replies.

Bluebeam is used to create Erection Procedures, shop drawing team review and coordination and documentation of structural calculations. (Image courtesy of CSG.)

Bluebeam is used to create Erection Procedures, shop drawing team review and coordination and documentation of structural calculations. (Image courtesy of CSG.)

Wheelis saw the need for real-time usage accelerate during the pandemic, and the need for it continues as people move away from conference-based, in-person meetings and hold more frequent online sessions throughout that process, utilizing platforms such as Microsoft Teams.

As for what’s next for CSG, Warner said they are interested in Nemetschek’s Solibri software because he thinks the model coordination and checker functionality of Solibri could be extremely helpful. “I think that Solibri is a product we could benefit from.”

Overall, the Nemetschek solutions are a great fit for Warner and CSG. “We’re very specialized in what we do. We stick to steel detailing and structural engineering so the products we use day-to-day absolutely fill that need,” he said. There is one technology he’s got his sights on for the future: augmented reality (AR). “We’ve played with that and I don’t think the technology is there yet,” said Warner. “Maybe this is something where the Nemetschek Group can surprise us with a solution that adds value.”

To learn more, visit the Nemetschek Group.