Item: PlanSwift, by ConstructConnect
Rating: 9
Author: Ketaki Shiralkar

Overall Satisfaction with PlanSwift

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The pre-construction department of our organization is the primary user of PlanSwift. However, from time to time, the Project Management team finds itself browsing through this software for confirming take-off items. It makes the take-off and pricing for intricate plans easier, quicker, and clearer for all team members to understand the work.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It has this really convenient single click/hover-over feature where it tells various attributes of a take-off. For example, if an area has multiple types of slabs, and we need to find the length of slab edge form for all of those, we just need to hover over each area and it gives us the quantities.
It has a great browsing feature - you can add any file/image from across your network thus making it easier to share with colleagues.
It integrates directly with MS Excel thus making it easier to create and evaluate reports during or at the end of a project.
It has good tools for editing as well - for instance you take off a slab on grade as floating but later find out that it sits on top of the foundation walls - you don't need to redo the take off, you can merely double-click, add extra points and move them around to modify your work.

Cons

If there was a way to break a take-off line, that would be very helpful. At times I find myself taking the curbs off for the site work, and when I need to separate the straight curbs with the integrated curbs with sidewalks, I need to just redo the work. It would have been good if PlanSwift gave an option of breaking down lines the way it does for deducting parts from an area.

Return on Investment

The positive impact is that it has simplified our quantifying process and also helps keep records in a great way. The Project Managers can access a file from years past, and check the items they need to, as opposed to a personal long hand take-off done by someone which has the chances of getting misplaced.
We don't use this for pricing purposes, so we haven't had much return on investment there.

Other Software Used

AutoCAD 360, QuickMeasure OnScreen, Adobe Flash

Likelihood to Recommend

I use PlanSwift for all my projects - it has just cut my time by a major percentage when it comes to quantifying a blueprint. At times there are funky areas, which are just hard to calculate on paper. It also has a great tool for scaling according to the dimensions, so if a drawing is missing a scale, you can always allot a scale by giving directions and then marking the points. I use this tool to check the scale as well - sometimes the drawings say something but the scale if off and you are left with an incorrect take-off. The dimension tool is a good way to check that.

We don't use it much for pricing purposes though, we have found other software which are more robust when it comes to estimation, but we can see using PlanSwift for pricing sometime in the future.

Comments

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Quantifying made super easy!