MVparts or Fabrication ITMs for Equipment?

[liz.fong]

If utilizing Fabrication (between 4 Departments - Estimating, Engineering, Detailing and Production/Fabrication), what would best practices be regarding the use of MVparts vs Fabrication ITMs for equipment (VAVs, GRDs, Fans, etc...)?

Musts at any given stage:

1) Equipment Takeoff/Reports (including Model Numbers, Dimensional data, Equipment/Schedule number, etc.)

2) Association with a service/service layer, for ease of isolation by service (i.e. if one needed to create a supply service plot & a return services plot...associated equipment would isolate with the duct/fittings.

Our company has an extensive MVpart catalog utilized by 1 department only.  Should other departments move to MVparts, or should MVparts be replaced with fabrication ITMs?

[JHoward_HOB · Accepted solution]

I am not extremely familiar with AutoCAD MEP other than the fact that I've been hoping the parametric part builder becomes part of Vanilla AutoCAD's dynamic block system someday.

I will say that if your doing sheet metal then Fabrication should be the superior software. I am not a sheet metal guy, but I can tell you that every sheet metal person I've ever worked with (on the construction side) prefers Fabrication over just about any competing product. I can also tell you that everything on you bullet list should be entirely possible through Fabrication and would not work through using a hybrid of MVParts with Fabrication; your in an all or nothing situation for sure.

Fabrication parts can hold as much custom data as you want; for various tags and specs you might want to track.

Worksheets could theoretically fully dimension a printout of the equipment you build through parametric ITM's. Note that you won't like the output of a "CONVERT3DMODEL" version of them and that building content from scratch in Fabrication is often a long series of poking and prodding until you get it just right.

If an object is added to a specific service and it has a unique service type, you can then manage that unique service types layer through the Service Setup and Fabrication standard SL1 command would isolate the duct with the equipment if its on the same Service.

I sense you have some AutoCAD MEP hold outs and your out fact finding. Both packages do have some cool features, but unification to make all departments produce similar output looks professional and should be what all companies should be attempting to do. I think the 1 vs 3 says it all right there and you just need to focus on getting the AutoCAD MEP hold outs trained on Fabrication properly; eventually they will probably thank you for the switch.