Quantity Surveying

[Anonymous]

Good morning

Our company has the opportunity to expand into building what we draw up, design/build.
So my question is we want to integrate our pricing into the plans we draw but not quite sure the best way to approach this.

Do we purchase the book ArchiCAD - From CAD to quantity survey?

Do we move to a second program like VICO to achieve this?

Are there other options out there I don't know about?

We are looking to build housing from $250 000 to $1 500 000

Any advice would be much appreciated.

[Anonymous]

Since it appears you are doing it all in-house on relatively small projects I would suggest using the quantities tools within ArchiCAD. There are other more developed solutions such as Vico and Innovaya but this requires buying and (more importantly) learning and implementing additional complex and expansive software.

If you do take the ArchiCAD route you should definitely get Eric Wilk's book. The quantities tools in ArchiCAD are quite quirky and Eric does an excellent job of explaining their eccentricities.

[Anonymous]

Danj wrote:

Any advice would be much appreciated.

I would also look into ArchiQuant from Cygraph, as a very easy to learn and very user friendly Add-on for design caliber quantity takeoff.

[Anonymous]

Sorry for the late reply.

We use Archicad to design houses in the size/price range you indicated. We carry out our quantity take-offs with Archicad too: it is not the most straightforward section of the software, but once you get used to it, it becomes easy enough and allows you to eliminate potential human mistakes.

We also bought the book "From Cad to quantity survey" (or whatever the exact title is). The book shows several techniques to achieve quantity take-offs within Archicad. It is good enough, although the author did not double check his English translation (he's French), so that some paragraphs do not make sense in English. However, if you are to implement quantity take-offs in AC for your company, I'd definitely suggest you buy the book.

About the Cigraph add-on, I personally tested it and the only thing it does is to make the interface of the calculation menu more user-friendly. For what I saw, there are no added functions that are not already there in the calculation menu of AC. We did not buy this add-on (although we now have it thanks to a special Cigraph promotion, but I never use it).

[Rick Thompson]

AC can do what you ask, it just takes some time to get things set up. I tried ArchiQuant but didn't like it, but I was already set up in AC. It seemed like it would require too much re-linking with each pln, but maybe I am wrong. AC has powerful tools, it is just has a terrible interface and no internal means to organize what you generate (in my opinion). I would plan on exporting to a spreadsheet for that end work. This is a source of a major inconvenience when you need to make a change. Once set up and you have a clean work flow you can generate nice list very fast. If you like you can see what I generate on my web site. Under any plan there is a "sample" material list. I have not give up in GS to overhaul this area of the software. It is long overdue is really needed.

[Anonymous]

Hi Rick,

You have not put your website link so we can see the examples you are talking of. I am always very keen of watching other users examples as so many different situations, so many different habits , and so many different regulations, can result in such different uses of ARCHICAD.
On my side I am not doing a lot of quantities, I mean material quantities, but I am doing a loads of surfaces schedules. As in France we have very specific regulations for building permits, I have found a few workarounds to get schedules doing almost exactly what we need

[Rick Thompson]

Til wrote:
Hi Rick,

You have not put your website link so we can see the examples you are talking of.)

Sorry, I thought it was on there? It is now.

[nzangi_james]

As a quantity surveyor, I would be glad to see future versions of Archicad take the bold move of integrating tools for easier quantity extraction from the digital model. I have tried using the elements schedules to extract quantities before but I don't have full confidence in how the process is effected.

As a result, I moved on to use a template with options for pulling Archicad metadata from the model to an Excel file. You have to model everything using the template for you to be able to use the automatic excel link for quantity extraction.