HVAC plant mounting systems

• Design time cut 40+ hrs to <3 hrs
• Material costs down ~15% on avg
• Turnaround: days to hours

MonkeyToe turned to SkyCiv's Structural Engineering API because manually running the structural analysis needed for each HVAC platform design, fitting a lightweight aluminum platform to an existing, as-built structure under strict seismic requirements, was taking engineers more than 40 hours per project. That pace was hard to sustain across a growing pipeline of commercial, industrial, and retail projects, and the API gave MonkeyToe a way to automate the repetitive parts of that analysis rather than replace it wholesale.

Rather than adopt a generic off-the-shelf tool, MonkeyToe used the API to build its own internal configurator specific to how its platforms are designed: the tool automatically generates a structural model from a project's inputs, runs non-linear analysis against it, and reports pass/fail results and utility ratios for the engineer to review. Designs that pass preliminary screening are then carried into SkyCiv's Structural 3D software for further refinement, so engineers spend their time on judgment calls rather than repetitive setup and analysis.

MonkeyToe's core product, lightweight aluminum platforms that mount HVAC plant equipment onto existing commercial, industrial, and retail roof structures, is inherently project-specific: every installation has to be engineered to fit an as-built structure under sometimes intense seismic requirements, which meant a full structural analysis was needed for essentially every job. Doing that analysis by hand took more than 40 hours per project.

That manual process created a bottleneck as demand for MonkeyToe's platforms grew: preliminary design turnaround stretched into days, which slowed down quoting and project scheduling and made it harder for the team to take on more work without adding significant engineering headcount.

Before building its SkyCiv-powered configurator, MonkeyToe's engineers designed each HVAC plant mounting platform largely by hand: building a structural model for the specific as-built structure and seismic conditions of every project, running the analysis, and checking the results, all as a manual, one-off process each time. That approach took more than 40 hours of engineering time per project.

Because every project's roof structure, plant equipment, and seismic requirements were different, there was little the team could standardize or reuse between jobs without an automated way to generate and check models, so turnaround for a single project's preliminary design was typically measured in days.

Automating the preliminary structural design of its HVAC plant mounting platforms through SkyCiv's Structural Engineering API cut MonkeyToe's design time by more than 90%, from over 40 hours per project down to less than 3 hours. That let engineers move from a single time-consuming manual analysis to a fast, repeatable process handled largely by the internal configurator, with their own review focused on the results rather than the modeling and analysis work itself.

Faster preliminary design also shortened project turnaround from days to hours, letting MonkeyToe respond more quickly to quotes and take on more projects without a proportional increase in engineering time. Customers benefited too: MonkeyToe reports material cost savings of roughly 15% on average, since faster, more consistent analysis makes it easier to optimize each platform's design rather than defaulting to conservative assumptions.

MonkeyToe Development Manager Logan Klenner credited the collaboration directly for the impact, saying it "saved us a lot of stress and drama," and adding: "Props to the team – the turnaround time for support and being open to feature requests is great."