ACIST slashes time required for processing paperwork by 70%

The Client
Goldfinch Brothers, Inc., in Everett, Wash., has served the Puget Sound area since 1892. The company has been family owned since its inception, with more than five generations serving commercial and residential customers.

The Challenge
During the summer of 2007, Goldfinch Brothers was looking for a solution to help them increase efficiency, save time and reduce duplicate effort when it came to making and processing bills of materials.

They chose a project, the three-building Advanta Office Commons complex in Bellevue, Wash., to be their first using ACIST from GMTEC Software. Goldfinch’s scope of work on the project was approximately $6 million.

"It made sense to apply all the vital statistics regarding materials up front, during the drafting phase, since the shop drawings are the foundational documents from which all subsequent documentation are derived," explained Gene Davis, Senior Production Engineer in charge of Engineering, R&D and Drafting, with Goldfinch Brothers, Inc.

The Results
Right from the start, Davis said his engineering and drafting team was pleased with ACIST’s ease-of-use. But its real value became apparent when it was time to order materials.

"We call the process of generating the stock length orders, miscellaneous material orders, glass orders and saw cutting lists ‘manifesting,’" Davis explained. "Considering the manifesting process as a single budgetary component, ACIST has easily cut our manifesting time by 70 percent."

It’s hard to argue with results like that, and Goldfinch reaped a number of benefits from ACIST:

• Slashed time needed to complete manifesting process by 70 percent over previous manual processing
• Reduced manpower required to complete manifesting documentation from 3 project managers to 1 drafter - while improving overall accuracy
• Shifted responsibility for manifesting process from project management to Engineering/Drafting
• Improved drawings’ accuracy and comprehensiveness - Automated cross-referenced annotative relationships between the floor plan schedules, window elevation labels, detail bubbles and sheet numbering all help combat the human factor that can cause errors.

"I am very pleased with the program’s efficiency and accuracy, as well as the flexibility to still apply our own drafting standards and formatting in the drawings," Davis said. "And since the files generated by ACIST are standard Windows file formats, each individual company can easily apply its own documentation standards to the output."