Smart bills of quantities on Kabandy
The quantification of a construction project in BIM is often performed with a set of BIM models and Excel exports. In this approach however, the link between a quantity in the Excel file and the measure on the model is not available.
At Kabandy, we strive ourselves to bring more transparency and confidence in the quantity management to ultimately gain more control over the overall cost of the project. Therefore it is critical to allow users to know exactly how each quantity has been measured in the model. This is achieved by converting the static quantity values in Excel into an actionable viewpoint in Kabandy where the user can visualize and check the measure, adapt it if necessary, and then share it with colleagues or other stakeholders. The whole table becomes an online “augmented Excel” – called board – connected with the model and accessible to all team members.
However, building a board made of several thousands of items requires many manual operations, which can be both tedious and prone to errors. This process can be dramatically improved with an automated generation of boards from the Excel files.
Automating BoQ from Excel
Smart BoQ is a new import functionality that converts an Excel spreadsheet into a dynamic board in Kabandy. Whether you start building a BoQ from scratch or you reuse an existing template, this feature saves days of manual operations.
To make this feature as simple to use as possible, we developed new algorithms:
- Kabandy interprets the classification codes of the items to organize the board. Since there are almost as many codification systems as projects, we have devoted our efforts in the development of an original algorithm able to cover a wide variety of systems.
- The units written in the Excel file are used by Kabandy to set the units of the quantity that will be calculated based on the model. Let it be written “m”, “meter”, “mètre”, “LM”, etc., Kabandy will detect that we are talking about length and set up the units used in the quantity viewpoints.
- Last but not least, the user can add an extra column specifying one or several property values used to filter the objects. Kabandy then reads these values to retrieve the building objects, automatically calculate the quantity and create a viewpoint. With just one property value!
By doing so, the users can now import very large BoQ (several thousands of rows) with just a minimal formatting of the initial Excel file. Then they can spend more time checking the calculations, analyzing the results and making decisions.
One condition to make this happen
There is no black magic. To make this happen the property should be specified in the model. And we all know that models are never perfect, especially when they are sent by external parties who have other interests. This is where the Kabandy property editor comes into play. This complementary feature will be discussed in an upcoming article.