Holder Construction, a contractor of large commercial projects, based in Atlanta, has deployed Oblong’s Mezzanine platform to connect team members in multiple locations and improve collaboration.
Doug Hunter, EVP for pre-construction at Holder, confirms all projects of the firm go through his group. His staff in several cities meets regularly to review architectural plans before construction begins. The team chose Mezzanine to improve visual communication and collaboration across locations.
As Chad Douglas, director of pre-construction, explained: “We had a client who was very early in the conceptual phases of putting a project together. Our virtual design and construction department sat in the Mezzanine room with the Revit file up on the screen and started making adjustments on the fly – what if we stretched this building a little bit taller, what if we made it a little bit wider. The ability to use Mezzanine and bring everyone into one place, in real time, meant that it was a five-hour effort as opposed to a five-week effort, because we had the technology to solve the problem quickly.”
With Mezzanine, the distributed team is able to share multiple pieces of content at the same time, including drawings, timelines, budgets, and bids, from familiar applications. The pixel-rich multi-screen data visualisation and creation capabilities of Mezzanine enable large files to scale and render with fine resolution. Zooming into the details is easy, as is annotating content and capturing display views in the moment. So, for example, when looking to value-engineer a major project for a client, multiple versions can be assessed simultaneously. Insights are surfaced, and issues are addressed together in real-time, instead of in a serial fashion with a lot of back-and-forth.
“It’s clear that when all the stakeholders, tools, and materials can meaningfully converge – wherever they are located, including on the job site – problems are surfaced and solved quickly,” said John Underkoffler, CEO, Oblong Industries.
