Change Your Work Life in a Day: PowerPack for Plant 3D

How would it improve your work life if you could complete your Plant 3D projects in less time and with more accuracy? Efficient workflows and automation to do that are possible with new PowerPack for Plant 3D by Graitec.

• Design more efficiently – Everyone is under pressure to design faster and more efficiently and do new things in light of new technologies being introduced every day. The key is finding and reusing design and engineering data.
• Work more effectively – Communicate design information to customers and internal groups.
• Extend your capabilities – Add tools to your design workflow that allow you to manage content standardization beyond your current capabilities.

PowerPack fills gaps in the standard Plant 3D tools, simplify a function or extend the software’s capabilities. 

Following are ways you can change your work life in a day using PowerPack for Plant 3D:

1. Workflow automation : Eliminate the hassle of vendor models when bringing manufacturer references into the 3D modeling environment. This affects 100% of users on the project – it can save 225 hours per model (depending on equipment).

Initial estimates are that a medium to large project may use about 150 pieces of equipment. Using Inventor to bring those into a model helps with file cleanup. But it has to be done each time a vendor submits a file. In addition, when using the import command, extra information needs to be added from the vendor package. The manufacturer reference in PowerPack is a way to streamline that process. Whatever you do during the file cleanup, it does not have to be relinked when a vendor model changes. PowerPack remembers where those revisions are.

2. Data automation: Take advantage of the data in Plant 3D and distribute it better.

Export supports is one example. It affects 20% of users on the project and can save 150 hours per model. Your supports in Plant 3D may get modified when manipulating the model, and the dimensions are hidden inside the drawing file; it’s not part of the database. PowerPack gives you more data around what you do in your design model by giving you dimensional information in an Excel spreadsheet. You can improve the quality and use of your data from Plant 3D, for instance populating detail sheets with better data.

Another example is updating line groups. This affects 80% of users on a project and can save 32 hours per model. Users may need to populate isometric title blocks with line or spec information. That can either happen manually or through the data manager or through the properties palette. With PowerPack, when you open a model, the Data Manager tool looks for anything blank and populates the values for you. Correct information shows up where you need it, helping with efficiency and getting your drawings out faster.

3. Fill workflow gaps. Since Revit doesn’t support object enablers, Plant 3D files need to be converted to native AutoCAD files before importing them into Revit. The automations in the PowerPack feature Export AutoCAD assist with that. You can copy drawings and isos between projects, as well as pull pieces of one project, copy them and put them into another project.

To learn more about PowerPack for Plant 3D and see a demo of these time saving features, contact us !

---