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Digital-Asset Management in AEC/O (AEC in Focus Column)
1 Oct, 2007 By: AIA ,H. Edward GoldbergUsers can access digital information wherever and whenever they want.
The AEC/O (architecture, engineering, construction, and operations) industry spends an estimated $500 million or more each year moving plans from one discipline to another via such courier services as FedEx. Not only is this practice costly in terms of dollars — the cost in terms of its carbon footprint and time is probably in the billions.
With the advent of the Internet, digital project management has become an economical standard for all types of industries, and it is rapidly expanding into the AEC/O arena. The entire construction train has been interconnected electronically, and standards for interconnectivity are evolving for the interchange of 2D and 3D CAD data through IFC, DWG, and DWF formats. Add e-mail, bitmap pictures, Word documents, and PDFs, and you have a problem with digital-asset management. In other words, to manage the physical project, you first must manage the information project.
Recognizing an available niche, several developers have designed software specifically to manage AEC/O digital assets. This is not to imply that we are making big inroads toward the paperless office — unfortunately, we're not — but software products are available to control projects through digital-asset management.
attolist
www.attolist.com
New to the market and conceived by a registered architect, attolist was designed to help architecture firms organize their construction-administration information in a central location that is easily accessible through any Internet connection. Believing that construction administration is inherently filled with redundant, costly tasks, attolist developers wanted to eliminate that redundancy.
This software is 100% Internet based; it has no CDs or updates to install on individual computers. The application resides on a Web server that can be hosted by attolist or by an architecture firm (figure 1).
 Figure 1. attolist helps architecture firms organize their construction-administration information in a central location that is easily accessible through any Internet connection. |
attolist doesn't have per-user licenses; fees are based on a per-month/per-project basis, which makes it affordable for a firm of any size. The application works on any browser and does not require any plug-ins such as Active X.
To gain access to a project, each user needs a username and password and must be invited by the architect to view a project. Different types of access levels are available. Architect users have unlimited access to a project, but contractors and owners have read-only access.
attolist currently provides a submittal and request for information (RFI) log. The RFI software is 100% electronic. PDF and JPEG files can be attached to RFIs for quick reference. Attolist also has integrated automatic e-mail notification and builtin automatic weekly to-do lists. After a user has been added to the project, merely selecting them as a recipient results in the automatic generation of a submittal and a PDF transmittal.
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About the Author: H. Edward Goldberg
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