The Challenge

Today’s push for remote work and custom designs have exposed some logistical difficulties for Starline Windows. To continue providing services in every step of the process, there is a constant need for better tracking and traceability of project commitments, product manufacturing and installation life cycles. Starline Windows faces business challenges that many other businesses face such as (1) lack of design collaboration engagement with external architects and contractors, (2) lack of design revision visibility for field personnel, (3) lack of project cost clarity, (4) limited data transfers between operating systems from the office to the field and (5) lack of cross department visibility in their overall coordination for logistics management.

First and foremost, Starline Windows has always sought to improve granularity and accuracy related to their costing takeoffs. Due to software limitations, they often had to manually manage their takeoffs and Bill of Materials (BOM). This resulted in other departments working with manually generated data reports on a regular basis which are prone to human error.

The Solution

Starline Windows first connected with SolidCAD in late 2019 to provide insight to the concerns and challenges they have been facing. SolidCAD helped organize a detailed plan that would organize their pain points and provided a solution into four key phases:

PHASE 1: Improving their Product Lifecycle Management

Starline needed a solution that would better manage their projects for employees working in office and provide visibility over the progress of those projects. SolidCAD implemented Fusion Lifecycle Manage PLM to achieve this and set-up automatic notifications to any team members, to ensure they are always staying on track with any project changes.

PHASE 2: Enhance their Design process with Revit and Inventor

Outside of the issues with their workflows, they also struggled with their current 3D design process. Starline was looking to better automate their workflow between their Revit models and how they would be imported into Inventor for further manufacturing design. SolidCAD automated model creation based on their Revit schedule into Inventor, speeding up their entire design process.

PHASE 3: Document Management with Vault

With the seamless connectivity between Revit and Inventor, it was important that all teams were working with latest design files. It was critical to integrate Autodesk’s Vault Professional to ensure that everyone at Starline was working from a central source of organized data. As a result, Starline noticed an immediate improvement in being able to easily manage the revisions that slowed them to automatically tracks changes, maintains past file versions, and capture the entire history of their designs. This also reduced the amount of time and rework that often happened when they worked with outdated files.

Most importantly, Starline wanted a seamless integration between their newly implemented Fusion Manage PLM system and their Autodesk Vault, which SolidCAD was able to achieve through a managed service delivery team.

PHASE 4: Collaboration on field and in office with BIM 360/Autodesk Construction Cloud

Although it was important for SolidCAD to help Starline Windows integrate systems that would better connect their internal departments and processes of design management, they also needed a solution to collaborate with their on-field and in-office employees. SolidCAD introduced Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) and specifically Autodesk Build and integrated it with their PLM solution to manage their Revit models and provide project visibility. Starline Windows was able to easily record, capture and manage the exchange of design data between their project teams and on-field contractors, ensuring that all teams were working from the latest model designs produced in-office.

The Results

Over the past year, SolidCAD has successfully implemented these various solutions and continues to support Starline throughout each phase. Although many of these processes do not give instant results, Starline Windows have already seen initial improvements and are on track to many more successes in later stages of their journey, such as:

• Improved project management for office staff, allowing for visibility over processes and projects.
• Introduced Revit and Inventor to streamline their design process.
• Automation between Revit and Inventor allowed for automatic model creation based on Revit Schedule.
• Implementing Vault and connecting it to PLM software has led to accurate data sharing to be available remotely.
• Automation between ACC and PLM software meant that projects can be visible in personal productivity applications as well as project and organizational management allowing for improved resource management from beginning to end of projects.

To learn more about the solutions implemented and the ways that Starline Windows have recognized and overcome some of the biggest challenges facing their industry today, check out the recording from our online event, “The Digital Thread – A Customer Journey” with Catherine Walmsley, Business Analyst at Starline Windows and Autodesk’s Queen of Prefab, Amy Marks.