ALLPLAN

What do you like best?

1) Its flexibility: from very quick architectural design to construction modelling, from buildings to detailed joinery, from new buildings to historical ones.

2) The way information is organised: the "building structure" is one of the smartest feature to manage BIM

3) Interface with spreadsheet: we've developed a system to estimate the cost of the building, progress of work, etc, linking the model with third party pricing book (e.g. RICS).

4) Its scalability: allows to be very efficient as one-man-band or working as a team

I start using Allplan after graduating and I never stopped.

What do you dislike?

Modules like "stair" which have been pretty much unchanged in the last 20 years...

Unfortunately is not well-know as other software. However, having previous experience as teacher at the University, I always managed training in-house.

Few things I would like to see in the next releases:

1) Developing further modules for timber and steel construction (boosting the use of macro and smart parts)

2) Introducing a basic module to calculate U value and Glaser Diagram (that is a very straightforward improvement) would be beneficial.

3) Introducing a module to do the daylight calculation (something like Velux Daylight Visualiser..)

4) introducing a basic module for MEP as standard feature for architecture

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I never worked with traditional CAD in my professional career.

Just the idea of working in a 2D or 3D non-parametric environment is simply madness in my view.

Since the very beginning (20 years ago) I've experienced at least 50% of time savings for standard architectural drawings.

In the last 6 years I started developing construction models (initially in architectural firm, later in a construction company).

With Construction Modelling I solve 95% of problems occurring on site in 5% of the time.

More recently, with a friend and colleague, I've developed a system to synchronise the model with third party pricing books: we obtain estimate of cost in a matter of minutes.

The accuracy of our cost estimate is exceptionally good.

Using a specific platform (BIM plus) we are now experimenting the use of the model directly on site to check on details, materials, etc.

After 20 years I can certainly say that I'm working BIM completely with all the 5 dimension (3+ Cost + Time) which is a great achievement.

The biggest benefit is that, once built on screen, any project will be built on site without any surprise, missing information, uncoordinated information.

I'm not a fan of the so-called "federated model" as roles and responsibility are still rigidly dictated by the traditional way of working.

Nonetheless, I've exchanged information and pieces of model with colleagues structural engineers without problems improving coordination and clash detection.