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CAD
National Standard Brings Efficiency to Facility Planning M any parties are involved over the lifecycle of a large institutional facility, from the project’s administrators and A/E firm to the general contractor and facility management department. Exchanging electronic design and construction data can be challenging between these groups if documents are not formatted the same way.For more than a decade, the United States National CAD Standard® (NCS) has provided a structure for organizing the appearance of drawing sets so that electronic design data and printed output is presented in the same manner across the lifecycle of the facility. Because the NCS facilitates consistency across drawing sets, it helps reduce the chance of errors and change orders. By simplifying the exchange of data, and making it more efficient to find information, it also helps make it easier to reach sustainable building goals. Different A/E firms often are involved in each phase of an educational or health care project. When a team modifies a facility, it is important that information is organized in a manner that makes it easy to retrieve for others who use the drawings. The NCS allows the same format to be used for those drawings, so that facility managers and their contractors do not encounter different styles down the road. If every member of the building team uses the NCS, facility managers can be sure that they will receive uniform drawing sets and electronic CAD files. The NCS also makes it easier to transfer project data from design software to facility management programs. Improving the Building Process A variety of organizations – including Albuquerque Public Schools, the University of Indiana and the National Institutes of Health – have voluntarily adopted the NCS for their facilities because it is a comprehensive standard to ensure the consistent appearance of project drawings. This is particularly important for facility managers when they refer to the drawings long after the building is complete. NCS improves the efficiency of exchanging design and construction data which is why so many organizations have adopted the standard. A single standard for the appearance of construction drawings is particularly important on large, complex projects. Our firm used the NCS when we designed the Tri-Service Community Hospital at Fort Belvoir in Northern Virginia. The Army Corps of Engineers, in conjunction with the U.S. Army Health Facility Planning Agency, Tri Care Management Agency and Medical Facilities Center of Expertise, required a 1.27-million-square-foot, world-class hospital complex that incorporated many sustainable elements. For example, it features automated lighting controls and an integrated storm-water system that will provide most of the irrigation water needed for the site. The sustainable design elements for the hospital complex will save $350,000 annually. Using the NCS helped our firm provide A/E and sustainable design services efficiently. "On the Fort Belvoir project, as well as all other projects, maintaining a strict policy of following the NCS has allowed us to automate processes through custom scripts, such as setting xref layers properties to specific needs while ensuring the backgrounds look consistent across all disciplines," explained Ron Croke, HDR’s digital design manager in our firm’s Alexandria, Virginia, office. "Without following layer naming standards, this would not be possible." HDR has been using NCS extensively for the last 10 years on nearly every project. Further, we have worked on some exciting sustainable health care facilities projects in which both the NCS and Building Information Modeling (BIM) were used, such as Metro Health Hospital, in the town of Wyoming, Michigan. It is the first-full service hospital in the state to earn Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED®) certification. The facility features high-efficiency chillers, controls that adjust artificial lighting for the amount of daylight entering some rooms and a 48,500-square-foot green roof. Using the NCS on this 427,000-square-foot project helped ensure that the graphical information in the construction drawings was communicated consistently to the entire team.
To fully realize the benefits of the NCS, it is important to use the latest edition (Version 4.0). It includes important changes for facility management. For example: • New data fields for fire protection and
telecommunications have been added, and existing discipline
fields have been expanded. In addition, NCS v.4.0 uses a single format for numbering sheets in the drawing set. When notations refer to other sheets it requires a specific drawing or sheet number to be referenced. This makes it easier for cross-checking purposes. Finding Information Needed to Meet Sustainability Goals As organizations increasingly incorporate principles of sustainability into design, construction and operations of their facilities, it is important to streamline the communication of project data to facilitate green building goals. NCS includes a notation system to make it easier to find products and materials in the project manual. Green building requirements are usually written requirements in the specifications. The NCS provides a better way to link drawings to the specifications in the project manual to help meet those sustainable requirements. The NCS employs Reference Keynotes, using a series of numbers and letters, within the graphic and notation area of the drawing block. They identify graphic representations of items and directly reference them to specific sections in the specifications. A reference keynote is unique to the object or material and serves as a consistent identifier (whether that object or material appears once or many times throughout the drawing set). NCS and BIM: Interoperable formats and BIM offer many benefits to the entire building industry, including facility management (the Fort Belvoir and Metro Health projects used BIM). As A/E firms hand over electronic models to facility managers, they can use them to find detailed information for operations, maintenance and facility planning purposes. Facility managers can share those models with contractors in the future that are working on renovations or expansions to their facilities. For facility managers not yet using BIM, adopting the NCS can be your first step in that direction because it is compatible with most BIM and CAD software. Drawings printed from CAD files must comply with NCS formats to meet National BIM Standard™ requirements.
If you are already using the NCS, you may be interested to know that the latest NCS revision cycle is underway. Anyone owning a copy of the NCS can participate in the revision process. All you need to do is join buildingSMART alliance’s NCS Project Committee and demonstrate that you own a copy of NCS v4.0. For more information about the revision cycle or the latest version of the United States National CAD Standard, please visit www.nationalcadstandard.org. R. Mark Butler is digital design technology section manager and senior professional associate with HDR, in Omaha, Nebraska. He is also chair of the United States National CAD Standard Project Committee.
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American School & Hospital Facility magazine and FacilityManagement.com are educational tools that teach institutional facilities professionals and the building team to operate, maintain and design structures efficiently, economically, safely, securely and green. The editorial mission is to report on the topics, issues, trends and products that impact facilities management. |
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