Highlights
5 ways to reinvent your preconstruction meetings, with cmBuilder.io
As we all know, preconstruction meetings are one of the most critical parts of a construction project’s life cycle. While you may have established a strong working relationship with a long-term client after collaborating across many projects, in today’s eminently competitive construction market, competing firms are constantly presenting their services to your client.
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5 ways to reinvent your preconstruction meetings, with cmBuilder.io
| 4 minute read

As we all know, preconstruction meetings are one of the most critical parts of a construction project’s life cycle. While you may have established a strong working relationship with a long-term client after collaborating across many projects, in today’s eminently competitive construction market, competing firms are constantly presenting their services to your client.

Now, as you walk into a preconstruction meeting, simply “showing your plan” to the client isn’t sufficient. Instead, the key to retaining clients in the long run is adding tangible value; for which, it’s essential to have the bandwidth to integrate creative and intuitive designs from architects and subcontractors to not only meet the client’s schedule, but also their evolving sustainability standards. The decisions made in a preconstruction meeting are pivotal to the ultimate success of a project. Therefore, during a preconstruction meeting, presenting your value addition strategies for every juncture of a project is crucial:

  • Advanced planning in preconstruction is Economical: By continually optimizing for maximum productivity and minimizing costs in a project.
  • Advanced planning in preconstruction is Innovation: By trying to incorporate Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) within the project where practical/feasible.  
  • Advanced planning in preconstruction is Proactivity: By taking on a proactive, rather than reactive approach when it comes to developing strategies to identify, address, and mitigate the numerous risks associated with a construction project.
  • Advanced planning in preconstruction gives you Options: By running rapid optioneering studies to analyze of alternatives such as comparing craning options, like 1 crane with1 hoist or 2 cranes with 2 hoists, excavation and shoring options, alternative traffic management options, etc.

The new paradigm for preconstruction meeting success is shifting with platforms like cmBuilder, which puts previously unseen functionality at your fingertips. Here are 5 ways to reinvent your preconstruction client meetings:

1) Elevate collaboration via 4D Simulation visualization

Gone are the traditional ways of entering a preconstruction meeting with stacks of 2D drawings or some screenshots of a 3D model; cmBuilder reinvents the concept of visual communication with its quick and easy 3D/4D site logistics modeling and simulation capabilities. Elevate your pitch and bring tangible value through the power of quick 3D/4D simulations created and performed in cmBuilder. After the meeting ends, share a live link from the simulation to project stakeholder to refer back to later. This link runs directly in the browser and does not require cmBuilder credentials to access the site, allowing for frictionless accessibility.

2) Prepare to impress

“We’ll get back to you on that,” is a statement you don’t need to make in a preconstruction meeting anymore when it comes to construction planning. With cmBuilder’s rapid scenario analysis capabilities running on the cloud, you have the ability to make changes and run scenarios in real-time during the meeting live, incorporating the project team’s feedback and from any device, anytime and anywhere.

For example, if you need to adjust the crane types and analyze the crane swing as per the load table, it’s as simple as drag and drop - first, search the catalog, drag and drop on the site plan, double click on the resource and there you go; you can now immediately access all the parameters of the resource and analyze it in real-time.

3) Get rid of PowerPoint slide files and use cmBuilder’s presentation and markup tool for meetings

Simply prepare dynamic screenshots of different phases of construction and add contextual information that drives the dialog with project team members, helping identify project risks early and find solutions to issues that might show up on site during construction.

Presentation and markup mode in cmBilder.io
3D resources from cmBuilder.io resource catalog used in construction project to visualize site logistics
Marking 3D resources and construction process using cmBuilder.io in your web browser

4) Synchronous and asynchronous collaboration with multiplayer mode and commenting

cmBuilder brings to you not only a game-changing, but a game-inspired feature that creates a synergic team space and enables real-time live collaboration on the cloud, no matter where you are located physically. Through the Multi-Player mode, comment to provide feedback, simply click to follow someone’s camera, track changes added to the history log, and more, to accelerate decision making. It allows you to frictionlessly bring everyone, right from your client to the subcontractors, to the same page, quite literally. Tag other users with comments for review of the site logistics plan, adding value to the full planning process.

5) Need to go offline? No problem! Export a video of your site simulation

cmBuilder is a 100% web-based platform that allows you to share live links of your site logistics simulations via the cloud, but we get it, sometimes you don’t want to risk the wifi signal and you want to go offline. With the cmBuilder sharing options you can export a video file of your simulation for offline viewing.

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