For nearly 15 years, my company, Engineered Efficiency, has worked with thousands of AEC users and firms to help them get the most out of the technology they use (or could be using). But this is a large industry with a tremendous amount of variety and disparate…
Infrastructure Outlook: Key Points You Need to Know About Aerial Photography
By Sherry and Brett Eklund No matter the project at hand, knowledge is power. The more perspective an engineer can gain when planning or completing…
The Climate Response—Government Leaders Take Action, Evaluate Vulnerabilities Due to Climate Change
By Nathalie Beauvais, Robert Brandon and Indrani Ghosh Across the country, government and industry leaders are taking a close look at the potential…
Don’t Lose Your LID—Learn These Lessons for Effective Stormwater Drainage
The concept of stormwater management under Low-Impact Development (LID) is fairly simple: it’s based on how nature handles rainfall in an undisturbed environment of meadows and woods. Nature works with simple concepts such as rainfall interception by the…
Tower of Power: Strong Steel Overcomes Constraints at a Tight Site
In Chicago, one of the world’s architectural capitals, it’s not uncommon to see unusual buildings, innovative designs and creative construction techniques. The winds are strong, the soil is poor, and there are a lot of regulations and coordination required…
Structural Solutions: Managing Risk through Careful Planning
In my later years in the Boy Scouts, the senior leaders took us older scouts on a leadership-training obstacle course—the equivalent of some of today’s office teamwork outings. One particularly memorable obstacle had two telephone pole uprights about six…
Executive Corner: Frequently Asked Questions about A/E Ownership Transitions
Of the wide-ranging internal-ownership inquiries my firm receives, most can be distilled into just a few ideas that ultimately answer the same question: “How can my firm make an internal transition process work?” So I thought I’d reflect on the most…
Managing the Model: Getting the Lead on the Late Majority
A longtime acquaintance recently started an engineering design firm, and he asked me and my staff at Engineered Efficiency to help him get their AEC technology up and running. Right now, his company is small and has a clean slate: they don’t have any bad…
Washington State Department of Transportation Uses 3D Immersive Visualization
The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) Visual Engineering Resource Group (VERG) uses Bentley’s 3D immersive visualization software, LumenRT, to create images, videos, and real-time presentations for use in such diverse applications as…
Reality Modeling for Everyone
Highly Accurate Context from Simple Photography Before beginning any infrastructure project, a project team needs to survey existing conditions in order to provide the foundational input to the decision-making process—to understand the context within which…
