Item: CMiC Construction Platform
Rating: 5
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company is currently transitioning to CMiC for both accounting and field construction management. I am part of a group within the company helping implement this transition. This transition is across the whole company. I am focused on the field side. We are primarily looking for CMiC to replace PlanGrid and Submittal Exchange as well as document management for projects. The change was largely driven by increased costs in both of those programs. We have rolled out some parts of the program already such as Drawing management, checklists, use of the mobile app. We are currently working on rolling out RFIs, submittals, daily logs, possible meeting minutes. Another group within my company is handling the Enterprise portion of the software.

Pros and Cons

Photo management is done well and our field finds it easier than our old system.

Missing functionality on the drawing management side. See previous question.
Submittal module changes in R12 took away key functionality from the user. Specifically the Fabrication and Delivery fields. CMiC promises to bring this back but the process is too slow. Users have waited months to bring back functionality that was taken away.
Submittal module interface via collaborator and I/O email is not updating status correctly.
The mobile app does not allow users to change auto-generated checklist names. We have a checklist that is supposed to be used per room but the program auto-generates list names as ###-001, ###-002, etc. In the mobile app, there is no way to see a unique identifier in the list view so users have to open and close each record to find unique identifiers. There is a workaround with the web client but our field employees say its too cumbersome. They are abandoning using the web client checklists and going back to paper copies.
Specification extraction does not work.

Return on Investment

The only positive impact I have seen is photo documentation.
Every other field function seems to be taking longer or the program has issues that are being addressed by the support team.

Alternatives Considered

PlanGrid and Oracle Primavera Submittal Exchange

The look and feel of CMiC is very similar to PlanGrid but when you get into the nitty-gritty of using CMiC for drawing management, it's lacking features our employees have pointed out. Submittal Exchange is much cleaner for submittal management. The interface is better. The specification extraction provided by Submittal Exchange far exceeds what is offered by CMiC

Support Rating

They are quick to respond to tickets. Once problems are identified, it takes too long for solutions to be implemented unless the mission is critical. It seems that issues on the enterprise side get all the attention because they have to deal with money but solutions for the Field and Document management side are slow to come.

This past Thursday we noticed a flurry of tickets being closed with incomplete answers or non-answer answers like the techs were being pressured to reduce the number of open tickets

Key Insights

Do you think CMiC Construction Platform delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with CMiC Construction Platform's feature set?

Did CMiC Construction Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of CMiC Construction Platform go as expected?

Would you buy CMiC Construction Platform again?

Likelihood to Recommend

The platform has a lot of potential but using it is cumbersome and frustrating. We currently have several issues with the drawing management portion of the program. People in our organization are not happy with the transition away from PlanGrid because CMiC lacks features they are used to. Complaints include:

Slow loading speed.
Lack of ability to search the text of the drawings.
Thumbnail view on the web client does not display sheet numbers.
Mobile drawing markup tool does not allow "sketching". Each time the finger comes off the table it assumes the user is done. Unless its a continuous line, it makes sketching on the tablet on a drawing sheet near impossible.
The web client drawing search function rest every time you click into and back out of drawings, forcing the user to redo the search each time.
The drawing upload process also lacks the features of Plan Grid, such as changing the sheet revision order or batch change of revision name.
OCR is poured and the CMiC Explorer is buggy, and often does not complete a proper upload.
The revision recognition function does work not properly, it does not apply existing sheet titles. In fact, it overrides exiting sheet titles while simultaneously locking the user out of changing the new titles which are often full of errors due to poor OCR. Forcing the user to do double work to work around this.

I have personally submitted several support cases. These have come back with statements of CMiC being aware of the issue and hoping to fix them on a future patch.

Too many ongoing issues. The CMiC boat has 15 leaks and only 10 fingers to plug them with.

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with CMiC Construction Platform