What kind of work does Strategic Mechanical do?

Strategic Mechanical, Inc., is a full-service mechanical contractor providing mechanical, electrical, and plumbing services to clients throughout California.  We run operations out of a 70,000 square foot shop in Fresno, California that includes an HVAC sheet metal shop, pipe fabrication shop, industrial metals fabrication shop, and electrical pre-fab. 

The key to our success has always been our ability to provide services for a wide range of clients.  We have always prided ourselves on solving problems in an efficient and cost-effective manner for our clients.  Our management staff works hand in hand with our field personnel to provide the best results for our customers. We know that plans can change at any moment but we always start with a plan because it’s better to have something in place than nothing at all.

What did your typical workflow look like, from design through production, before you brought in PypeServer’s workflow tools? 

In our geographic area, the use of BIM is still fairly new, so our projects often vary greatly. At any given time we have a mixture of projects ranging from fully modeled and coordinated to those that are 100% field layout with minimal design drawings. Many projects fall somewhere in between, depending on time constraints, manpower availability, and personnel skill sets. Regardless, our go-to method has been to generate spool drawings and push as much fabrication as possible to the shop, so we started 3D modeling as a way to generate the necessary drawings for prefabrication. 

For both piping and sheet metal fabrication, we typically relied on paper to get the job done. Our VDC department created drawings from a model, while our field foreman might send in hand sketches or isometric line drawings along with a BOM. When going through our VDC department, the completed model would get signed off and the spools would be broken down by system, area, floor, etc. Then the detailers would create stacks of 11×17 paper spool sheets and send them to the shop for dimension verification and fabrication.  Our pipe shop crew would then cut the piping and gather the fittings to create the assemblies. 

One of our first automation efforts was for hanger fabrication. We had a cold saw collecting dust in the corner so we purchased a TigerStop to feed it. The VDC department would pull hanger spools from our modeled work and then create the spreadsheets that the TigerStop needed to cut and label effectively.  After cutting, fabrication tracking was done using more spreadsheets.  It all worked and it was a great first step, but it took hours to create and manage all the spreadsheets so it was still a labor-intensive and error-prone process.

You’re using PypeServer’s Connect add-on for Revit, Cloud service, and Lyte software for three different TigerSaws. Can you describe the workflow and what you’re able to do now that you couldn’t do before?

We’re starting to prefabricate a lot more small-bore pipe using PypeServer. PypeServer Connect, Cloud, and Lyte have increased the pace at which we can go from a fab-ready model to fabrication and we’ve been able to eliminate the need for any hand takeoff.

Until recently, we would only prefabricate a small percentage of copper because we spent most of our resources on the larger, welded hydronic piping systems. Copper and cast iron would be considered a field responsibility to fabricate and assemble. Now, Revit provides the total required length of pipe we’ll need, and with a few clicks PypeServer Connect sends our cut lists via the Cloud directly to PypeServer Lyte on our TigerSaws, no spreadsheets necessary. This has allowed us to spool and prefab 2” and smaller piping that we would have fabricated in the field before because the time required to annotate and dimension 11×17” spool sheets for the shop outweighed the time to build it in the field.

Sending the cut lists through Cloud also makes it easy to keep track of progress. As Lyte sends work through the TigerSaw, it automatically updates Cloud on a cut-by-cut basis. Now, we can easily monitor every step of the fabrication process without having to manage spreadsheets.

Feedback from the field running jobs this way has been overwhelmingly positive and PypeServer will be used on all our fully modeled jobs moving forward.

Are you using PypeServer to prefabricate non-pipe components too?

PypeServer has completely changed the way we export hangers to the fab shop. In the past, we spent a lot of time in Revit to ensure that data exported to spreadsheets were in the exact order and with the exact column titles needed to ensure that each hanger tag was populated with the correct values. PypeServer has completely eliminated the need to build a spreadsheet in Revit. The Connect plug-in pulls the assigned data out of Revit and Lyte puts it where it needs to go using a label template.