How HKR Architects Transformed Modular Workflows Using Ideate Automation
Building a Vision for a New Era
Company: HKR Architects
Project Duration: 2023 to present
Location: Saudi Arabia
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When HKR Architects embarked on the residential village phase of a new port city in Saudi Arabia in 2023, they faced a monumental challenge. This development, set to be the largest modular residential-led mixed-use project in the world, covers one square mile and will include apartment buildings, schools, offices, hospitals, hotels, sports facilities, and restaurants. HKR’s part in the project involves circa 9,000 apartments in 70 residential buildings that will house up to 23,000 people.
Modular construction methods meant managing close to 1,000 models, each requiring rigorous quality checks. BIM Manager Moin Nagani said
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HKR’s Smart Integration of Ideate Software
The team partnered with Ideate Software in 2023, trialing the solution to address their workflow challenges. The initial promotion provided an opportunity to explore tools that complemented existing efforts to improve productivity. The magnitude of developing the largest modular residential scheme in the world pushed their Ideate Software to it’s limits. HKR worked closely with the Ideate Software team to help identify and overcome key limitations in their automation tools, including enabling second Revit sessions during script execution, resolving data scraping issues from ACC, addressing file quantity limits per folder, and managing duplicate model name conflicts.
By adopting the Ideate Software suite of Revit plugins and automation solutions into existing workflows, HKR was able to significantly improve efficiency. Manual tasks such as parameter filling, exporting PDFs, and time consuming tasks like running performance quality checks on models, including finding and removing redundant elements, were streamlined. “It was intuitive to use as well,” Moin said, emphasising how quickly the improved workflows cleared roadblocks. This led to significant increases in efficiency, allowing the team to focus more on coordination and design.
There’s innovation instead of repetitive, manual work, which has freed up time for more creative and strategic tasks. This was one of the key benefits of using the software.
Moin said.
Once the required parameters were meticulously set up, an automated workflow was developed to fill in model details with geo IDs. If changes were needed to be made to a single model, Ideate Software would perform the automation to fill in parameters, change a family type, or rename the objects to keep them uniform across all building modules. Ideate Automation coupled with Ideate BIMLink was used to extract data, export it to Excel, and put into PowerBI, where it could be visually checked and also set to export data from models.
Weekly schedules can be run over the weekend. The data could then be visualised, and errors could be detected. Moin explained
Using Ideate Automation was a very satisfying job.
He described some of the improvements, including reduced manual labour, improved speed of document generation, better exporting of PDFs, and exporting of parameter data. Integrated into HKR’s established processes, Ideate Automation contributed to the continuous improvement of design quality and consistency. Moin explained
It also helped us record drawing revisions and drawing issues to check compliance and improve efficiency.
Streamlined Design Through Intelligent Automation
HKR saw a significant improvement in managing repetitive Revit elements. For example, at one point the parameters needed to be filled for five million MEP elements: filling the parameters, copying parameters, adding client specific parameters, and completing quality checks.
Doing this manually would have been extremely time-consuming and inefficient
Moin stressed. With multiple modules occurring numerous times inside the models, there was a lot of repetition. Managing all the parameters was, as Moin put it,
quite a challenge, but we managed to do it utilising Ideate Automation.
HKR was able to do the same for the structural models, architectural models, and landscape models.
Enabling Excellence Through Innovation
The residential village project is planned for four phases, which could span a decade.
As a message to peers in the industry, Moin said,
I would advise other firms to go through, evaluate their current workflows, and identify areas where automation could bring the most benefits.
He added that investing in training can significantly change how firms operate and what they can achieve.
“We’ve had a very good experience working with Ideate Software,” Moin said. HKR participated in training and has benefited from long-term support. “Sometimes we had queries and questions, and they were very helpful.”
For HKR Architects, the adoption of Ideate Software tools for Revit streamlined our workflows significantly, through automation and the associated quantitative design analysis required for such a modular scheme on a global scale.
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