Automation for Structural Detailing

• 90%+ time savings on detailing
• Automated Revit section views
• Lower production costs

PPE is a Portuguese structural engineering firm that designs framing and reinforcement for concrete structures, and had grown frustrated with how much staff time went into producing section views and reinforcement detailing drawings by hand in Revit. Rather than adopt a generic third-party detailing tool, PPE wanted an add-in built around its own drawing standards and existing Revit workflow, so it worked with DiRoots to develop a custom Revit add-in specifically for its structural framing reinforcement process. Choosing a bespoke solution meant PPE's engineers could keep working inside Revit using their existing templates and standards, while automating the repetitive parts of section creation, annotation, tagging, and dimensioning that previously had to be done manually for every drawing.

As a structural design firm, PPE found that detailing reinforcement for sections and elevations was one of its most time-consuming and repetitive tasks, and doing this work manually inside Revit was slowing project delivery and adding to production costs. PPE needed a way to speed up this workflow without abandoning Revit or its own established drawing standards, which ruled out simply switching to a different detailing platform. The firm also needed the automation to be reliable enough to handle real project geometry consistently, so that automating section view creation, annotation, tagging, and dimensioning would not introduce new errors into structural drawings that still had to meet engineering standards.

Before DiRoots built the custom add-in, PPE's engineers relied on Revit's native, out-of-the-box tools to produce structural framing and reinforcement detailing. That meant manually creating each section view, then manually placing annotations, tags, and dimensions on every reinforcement drawing one at a time. Because reinforcement detailing has to be repeated across many similar sections and elevations on a typical concrete structure project, this native workflow involved a large amount of repetitive, manual drafting work for PPE's structural engineers, which consumed significant staff time on every project and limited how quickly the practice could turn around detailed drawings for clients.

The custom Revit add-in DiRoots built for PPE automates the creation of section views along with the annotation, tagging, and dimensioning of reinforcement drawings, replacing a process PPE's engineers previously had to do by hand for every section and elevation. According to DiRoots, the add-in delivered over 90% time savings on this reinforcement detailing workflow compared to PPE's traditional, native-Revit approach. That time saved lets PPE's structural engineers spend less time on repetitive drafting and more time on engineering work, while also cutting the production costs associated with manually detailing every drawing and helping the firm turn around structural documentation more quickly for its clients.