Sweco successfully replaces Tekla BIMsight with Trimble Connect
BIM Expert Pasi Kivimäki has long experience in structural designing and modeling. His career started back in 1988 with AutoCAD and continued later in 2002 with Tekla’s Xsteel product. Pasi Kivimäki is leading the Sweco steel design and detailing environment development.
Sweco (originally "Swedish Consultants") is a large European engineering consultancy company with more than 15 000 engineers. Sweco plans and designs the communities and cities of the future. Their subsidiary Sweco Rakennetekniikka Oy is responsible for structural design and detailing - from small warehouses to large multi-billion projects, like Tripla and Kalasatama.
Tekla BIMsight previously used project tool
Pasi Kivimäki used to be a Tekla BIMsight user. The largest project on Tekla BIMsight has been the Riikinvoima waste incinerator in Leppävirta, Finland. For that project, the Tekla BIMsight .tbp file size was about 130 Mb. “We used Tekla BIMsight to communicate about the project with the owner and we used it to assist in the erection. We have also other projects, like Tavo waste incinerator and Kemira Soihtu project, where we used Tekla BIMsight for the erection. We have been using Tekla BIMsight for ages to check the quality of our Tekla Structures IFC export. It has served us well as an easy-to-use model viewer”, he states.
Versatile use cases for Trimble Connect
“We currently use Trimble Connect efficiently in the Helsinki Olympic stadium renovation project. We have been sharing our assembly files (models, drawings etc.) with the steel fabricator in Poland. We use Trimble Connect workflow tools to manage design-fabrication-erection statuses.”
In another project, the company is testing automatic drawing linking to model objects and assemblies. This involves Tekla Structures extension for Trimble Connect in Tekla Warehouse. “Technically it’s working very well, but sometimes it can be tricky to select the right drawings.”, says Kivimäki and continues: “I have switched to use Trimble Connect for everything I used to do with Tekla BIMsight. And beyond.”
Trimble Connect improvements versus Tekla BIMsight
“Actually there is one pretty simple thing when I open the IFC file from file explorer: it does not create a Trimble Connect project but opens the IFC directly for viewing. When you close it, it does not remain as a project on your project list. This is great! I do not need to constantly clean up the project list page”, says Pasi.
He concludes: “Overall, you can really feel that Trimble Connect for Windows is a true successor of Tekla BIMsight, developed by the same development team. It has the same look and feels as Tekla BIMsight, but many new features and it's cloud-enabled.”
Learn more about Trimble Connect
More information on how to take Trimble Connect for Windows into use