Likelihood to Recommend Autodesk Bim 360 is well suited to the majority of construction projects in my opinion. On the construction side I could see how the straightforward nature of the platform would be well liked. The new update with the widgets is a great touch and allows for ease of site visits by showcasing good to know info like project location on a map and the local weather. You can also customize the "widgets" as you see fit to add more information if necessary to the home screen. From my experience as a LEED consultant, Bim 360 does not differ much from other platforms used for submittal review like
Procore . It is easy enough to search for what you want but searches do take a while and you need to move the cursor over every time you search and do not find what you're looking for, which seems very unnecessary. Overall it is fine for reviewing documentation but isn't anything extraordinary.
Read full review Our operation uses several pieces of what we call specialty equipment (not used every day on every job). The foreman when finished will give a location of where this equipment is left, this many times can be very vague and lead to a lowboy driver trying to block around to find the piece or driving down a street he cannot get turned around in. With the GPS devices, the driver can pinpoint exactly where the unit is and if he has room to turn around at that location.
Read full review Pros Live updates between design teams. This keeps the team up to date for quicker design and frees up personnel from having to do file transfers. The cloud-based platform gives your company a little bit of a break on computer requirements. Allows multiple offices and/or cloud-based consultants to collaborate on a design as if they are one office or one company. Read full review #1 is support! HCSS is by far the best software support of any product we have ever used. Unlike most software companies HCSS utilizes their support calls to help upgrade their software. When you here them tell you that they will write down a particular issue you come across during a support call if they can't help you then and there they will research and get an answer to you extremely fast. If the software will not do it, you can bet there is a good chance it will be on the list of enhancements you will see come out in the near future. Estimating software is very extensive. Their software is capable of handling the smallest estimate all the way to the largest joint venture estimate. It has advanced features that make it extremely useful for analyzing job materials, subcontractors etc. HeavyJob is an extremely useful tool for the field to keep the office up to date with job costs. Everything is at the Foreman's fingertips on Tablets to allow the information from the field to get uploaded to HeavyJob manager which then can export to accounting. We are also able to give our Foreman the ability to deal with the Daily and weekly safety needs (Tailgate Meetings, incident Investigation, observations etc.) right on the Tablets thru HeavyJob. Read full review Cons Bim360 is extremely unintuitive and frequently confusing to end users. There are multiple avenues of sharing and collaboration for models and information. The advantages/disadvantages of each and how to perform even the most basic of tasks requires extensive training and mentoring for even the most advanced of users. There are many enormous limitations and constraints to BIM 360 that are not immediately obvious and even contrary to published marketing materials and even product naming. Development cycles of the product are seemingly monthly, but incredibly minor. This makes the desperately-needed and glaringly obvious massive usability, capability, and performance improvements into deal-breakers and hair pulling events. Change cannot come fast enough. There are no integrations into Microsoft's Azure AD SSO or other 3rd party SSOs available for SMBs. This makes the provided MFA a huge headache for all SMBs. There are no integrations into the Microsoft 365 ecosystem for SharePoint/OneDrive or Outlook. This is desperately needed for most organizations using Bim360. Read full review All their apps are on mobile devices. Although there is not a clear company policy on Android versus iPhone. Updates for features lag behind on Android. Some apps are exclusive to one platform making it hard to fully interconnect all programs. Read full review Usability As mentioned, user interface appears messy and complicated at initial onset. Training is necessary but becomes easy to maneuver through after solid daily use.
Read full review Support Rating AutoDesk support is slow and if you are not an enterprise customer they will likely tell you to go to forums and post for help pushing the support on the high-level end-users (some of which are AutoDesk employees). I haven't actually had issues requiring support with docs altough there are some features I wish it had
Read full review I have never had a bad experience or heard of one in 4 years of doing business with HCSS. That is unheard of even with the hurricanes and flooding in Houston area it feels like HCSS was always there and willing to help in every way.
Read full review Implementation Rating I was not employed with PPI upon implementation. I would prefer to reference my previous statement, that each company needs to evaluate its culture and address your implementation accordingly. The purchasing company should assign an employee as point person and really take charge of not just the technical side of the implementation (HCSS pretty much handles that), but focus on company culture and training.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The saving in reduced field changes/mistakes quickly paid for the license plus some. The software allows for easy data collection, especially at project completion for field software by checklist creation. Furthermore, the internal punch-list tracking, tracking completion lists and punch lists created for us by others is optimal compared to the competition. We chose Bim360 over other options due to its ability to import out of other software programs directly into the system, adding reports in one location and then distributing it to subcontractors and internally from there to fix deficiencies. It does the tracking, importing, markups of pictures and document viewing well and fulfills our needs.
Read full review Other estimating products I have used consist of ICE/MC2 and MS Excel. ICE was not a good fit for our company, as they have awful technical support and offer very poor training. MS Excel is great for simple estimates where there is not a lot of data being compiled. However neither hold a candle to the power of HCSS Heavybid
Read full review Return on Investment Positively we use for all safety items, so its potential to save money is really something cannot be quantified. It has helped document trends, big items leading trends and odd ball cases which overall helps perfecting process to eliminate those trends and save time. Negative impact is we need to pay for another program to handle budget, submittals and bidding so we are paying for two systems and paying for all employees to learn each system and possible make errors since there are differences in the systems. Read full review The biggest ROI for us was the ease of adoption by field personnel. Read full review ScreenShots