CASE STUDY - SUCCESS STORY - Ken Andrews, Turnerville GA

Kenneth Andrews is an architect in Turnerville Georgia, in the mountains outside of Atlanta. In practice for 37 years, he and his business partner converted to ArchiCAD over the past two or three years, gradually learning how to take advantage of its power and speed.

In March 2011, Ken signed up for the Best Practices Course and bought MasterTemplate. One of the first things he learned was how to take advantage of the Favorites palette, as well as the graphic array of Favorites in MasterTemplate called the Interactive Legends.

He says that by using the template he has "gained an emormous amount of time as it all made simple sense and was organized as to the architectural work flow, from preliminary design thru finished construction documentation."

Learning good approaches to layer management has helped Ken "understand and work with different views very effectively." Integration of keyboard shortcuts and other power-user best practices methods has saved him "an enormous amount of time and frustration."

PRESENTING A WINNING PROPOSAL IN RECORD TIME

In the spring of this year, Ken received an invitation to present a design proposal for a bank branch office building. His firm was contacted after another local firm withdrew, and he had a very short time to create a design and put together a presentation.

The three other firms competing for the job were much larger than Ken's two man office.

In four days, Ken and his partner put together a design and a killer presentation that won them the contract. They were told that the other firms didn't even come close to what Ken had shown them.

Ken told me that previously it would have taken them at least a month to do this type of proposal and presentation, and it wouldn't have been to the same caliber.

IMPRESSIVE RESULTS: DOUBLE THE SPEED, MORE PROJECTS AND PROFITABILITY

Immediately after they won the job, the project was fast-tracked so they had to get the drawings done as quickly as possible. In four and a half weeks they got the construction documents ready for submission, a process that previously would have taken 8 or 9 weeks - essentially about twice as fast as before.

Winning this job and satisfying this client has brought them additional work in this niche. They have gotten three more design projects from other local banks in the past 6 months.

Ken says he is very thankful that his firm has been kept busy and is highly profitable even in a tough economic environment.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Ken is a great example of someone who was productive with ArchiCAD, but wanted to use it with more mastery and efficiency. By studying the Best Practices and using a robust project template, he is now able to deliver better quality results in a fraction of the time.

Ken is doing well because he invested in himself - improving his skills, knowledge and working tools. The payback has been quicker and larger than he ever expected.