Door Scheduling Made Easy Thanks To ‘Openings Studio’ By ASSA ABLOY

Architizer News

Door Scheduling Made Easy Thanks To ‘Openings Studio’ By ASSA ABLOY

December 17, 2012

With over 900 discrete openings, Openings Studio was an incredible timesaver for DLR Group as they wrapped up the CDs for Joplin High School in Missouri.

Architecture isn’t all about willful form making. There are also the pesky important details that have to be worked out that eat up a lot of your design time. Take door schedules, for instance. You’d give anything not to have to sift through those endless Excel spreadsheets and just get back to making things, right? Well, try out ASSAABLOY’s Openings Studio™ program, which takes care of the tedious task of door scheduling and lets you focus on design. Continue.

ASSA ABLOY Openings Studio for Revit from Alfred Huang on Vimeo.

“Openings Studio” comes packed with digital tools for creating, visualizing, extracting, modifying, and exporting door, frame and hardware 3D models and products. The web-based Openings Studio™ software application integrates seamlessly with 3D Building Information Model (BIM) environment Autodesk Revit® Architecture software. Instead of repeatedly updating plans, Word docs, and spreadsheets to get the most up-to-date information, the Openings Studio program allows you to sync with Revit. The cutting edge configuration tool can be used to analyze and import existing architectural door models and create revised versions containing detailed door, frame, and hardware parameters and data. These “complete openings” can then be exported back into the BIM project model at various levels of detail at the discretion of the user. With Openings Studio you are able to build custom “door family” libraries for use in pre-design or pre-construction that can be individually tailored to the specific needs of a firm or client.

“BIM has been taking off in the last few years with architects, contractors, and facility managers, so when we wanted to interact with these stakeholders a program was needed that could be customized to their openings needs,” said Thomas P. Lewis, Director of BIM Technologies for ASSA ABLOY Door Security Solutions. “For some time I was hearing: ‘How can you help us use Revit more efficiently’.”

ASSA ABLOY started offering the tool to a test group of BIM savvy architecture firms around 18 months ago. Lewis felt these firms made a good test ground as they often were well aware of Revit shortcomings and capabilities. Amber Beverlin, an associate with Kansas City-based DLR Group, was one of those early adopters. DLR Group designs a lot of schools, a building type redolent with many different types of openings.

“Door schedules and door hardware are not sexy, not something we dream of,” said Beverlin. “It is an important task this program makes more efficient, so we can move on to other design items making a difference.”

“Another benefit is that we avoid the risk of human error that used to occur when we had to call ASSA ABLOY and manually get all the hardware numbers,” said Beverlin. “Now all that information is built into the program. At the Joplin High School we had 700 openings, so that’s a lot of hardware.” She continues: “In the old process, you would print plans and door schedules and ASSA ABLOY would determine the hardware, but then you would have to go back and change in all of the other documents,” explained Beverlin. “Openings Studio addresses all that and makes it simpler.”

You still need to work with ASSA ABLOY’s specification consulting team, but the process is streamlined.“It takes some training, but many of our original testers are using the tool on a regular basis and we now have entered over 90 live projects,” explained Lewis, “the majority of our current users are larger architecture firms and contractors that routinely use BIM.”

While Openings Studio works seamlessly with BIM, Lewis is quick to note that even for those using AutoCAD the program is still a lifesaver. With AutoCAD, you can export your data via Excel and then it bring into Openings Studio, saving many intermediary steps.

For more, go to the Openings Studio site.