CBT Architects is a leading design firm headquartered in Boston, MA. Established in 1967, it now has 200 professionals that create tomorrow’s landmarks through a broad range of local, national and international projects in architecture, interior design and urban design. In 2018, for the third year in a row, ARCHITECT Magazine named CBT to its list of top 50 Design Firms for Business, Design, and Sustainability. CBT and Ideate Software Applications

Nirva Fereshetian, CBT’s Chief Information Officer and Associate Principal said, “Revit software is one of our Design Technology Team’s primary tools, and we use add-ons, including those from Ideate Software, to make Revit processes more efficient.”

For three years, the CBT Design Technology Team has been using Ideate Software applications to help project teams validate their project data and resolve individual model issues, and they proactively support all projects by incorporating the applications into model management processes.

Fixing Visibility Issues with Ideate XRay

Rood Vincent, from the Design Technology Team, said, “We get a lot of calls from Revit users who place an object into a view in Revit and then can’t find it anywhere. With Ideate XRay, the solution is fast and simple.”

“We select the ID number from the Revit Warning Dialog and then Ideate XRay quickly goes through more than 50 potential causes and identifies the problem. We fix the problem within minutes, and the team is able to get back to designing.”

Ideate XRay is part of IdeateApps.

Ensuring Accuracy with Ideate BIMLink

In an example of how CBT uses Ideate BIMLink, the Design Technology Team’s Lynn Quagliato talked about a hotel project that included six buildings, 700 guest rooms, and furniture counts for all the rooms. “Getting the furniture data through Revit wasn’t ideal, because the software can’t show it all. It was easy with Ideate BIMLink.”

In Revit, CBT set of the model with groups to populate the furniture. Then they used Ideate BIMLink to extract the furniture data along with the parameters, such as model group, room type and building number into an Excel spreadsheet. “There were more than 35,000 rows on that spreadsheet, and it only took two minutes to export,” said Lynn. The team then used Excel tools to: 

1. Filter the furniture
2. Double check the counts
3. See where the numbers were off
4. Correct the data

“After updating the spreadsheet, we easily pushed the data back into Revit, and within two minutes, the model was accurate.” 

Keeping Models Stable with Ideate Explorer

“Ideate Explorer give us deeper insight into Revit model elements and allows for enhanced selection options,” said William Paquette, CBT Design Technology Team. “This significantly aids in model management, allowing us to quickly identify where issues may be and areas that can be cleaned up.” 

Some of the ways CBT uses Ideate Explorer to find and fix problems that could impact model size, sync time and performance include identifying and deleting views that aren’t on sheets, finding and removing CAD files inadvertently imported into Revit, updating standards on older models, cleaning up Revit warnings, and aligning worksets after binding a model.

Getting the Most out of Ideate Software Tools

“We appreciate Ideate Software’s tools as well as its support,” said Nirva. “They help us ensure our people get the most of out their software by providing training, how-to videos, and help files that our Design Technology Team can dig into, and then showcase highlights to our designers using one of our real projects.” 

CBT Architects also use Ideate Sticky to link Excel files into Revit.