The Kowabunga Story

Dillon Mitchell, PE

IEEE Member

Author Note

[Self-Funded, boot strapped22523 Twain Harte Drive, Twain Harte, CA 95383]

Abstract

Engineers devote time and energy to designing and coordinating complex building systems while ensuring reliability of the design. However, many hours are wasted doing things that could be delegated or done within Surboard (a new plug-in for Revit). We must ask ourselves, are engineers supposed to be drafting receptacle locations? Does an engineer have to trade precious hours of his life or is there a better way? A solution has been created – Surfboard, a software add-in to Revit that continues to innovate improvement for project management. Surfboard solutions save time, increase cash flow, and productivity giving your team a better life and your company a better bottom line.

 

Keywords:  Surfboard, Revit, Electrical Engineering, Electrical Design, Lighting Design, Commercial construction, Power design, MEP

The Kowabunga Story

Engineers devote a great deal of time and energy to designing and coordinating complex building systems while ensuring the life-safety, effectiveness, and reliability of the design. As a Professional Engineer myself and having designed millions of square feet of commercial buildings from K-12, higher education, hospitals, primary care, clinics, office buildings, apartments, mixed-use, and industrial, I know the struggles engineers go through daily. An engineer holds responsibility for everything from an initial idea, integrating components, to the final design in place. Furthermore, an engineers’ expertise does not stop there. A project's more tedious tasks might include setting up sheets, placing devices, annotations, coordination, meetings, and other conversations not directly contributing to creating construction documents. Then there is the actual engineering and calculations to size and place equipment. Significant resources are consumed in this process, and sometimes they are wasted.

Research shows that engineers often work with tight, unrealistic deadlines, hopping from one project to the next and never giving projects the time merited. The four top problems identified in engineering firms are not enough time, over budget, not enough people, and setting standards (Dillon, 2021). While not ideal, it is the situation encountered on most projects usually due to one of the problems listed above. As an engineer, I set out to do something about it and created an add-in Surfboard for Revit.

Surfboard automatically places your families in the Revit model according to the parameters the engineer provides. The add-in gives the engineer design documents in minutes, a process that used to take hours or months. Surfboard allows the engineer/design team say good-bye to late nights and weekends in the office and hello to increased productivity, more profit in less time, and happier clients.

The firm also experiences the benefit of higher employee retention because they are not stressed and bombarded with tedious tasks. The firm is then able to bask in the ability to take on twice as many projects with the same electrical design team.

Deadline Management

Surfboard can help to resolve issues concerning deadline management for an engineer/designer.  Using Surfboard allows the engineers to factor in less time, coming in on budget, utilizing the people allocated to the project, and maintains the standards expected.

Time

In a firm, each project has budgeted hours that are in line with the costs of the actual project. The engineers are expected to come in below those hours “under budget.” As we know from experience these budgets are rarely correct and do not take to account the average hours from historical projects or the “unique” circumstances that seem to crop up on every project. Add in the fact that there is always another project, another deadline looming, and another stress point. The engineers/designers are not qualified for being thrown from one project to another but instead for computation of what to do during the process. Engineers are responsible for knowing and utilizing their soft skills i.e., team-work, problem solving, time management, critical thinking, decision-making, and communication on the job in order to increase productivity and if that does not occur, then, stress levels and knowing that you are responsible for signing off on the project at the end of the day create an inflexible working environment.

Engineers bouncing from one project to the next often means that small details are forgotten, especially when attention is diverted from one urgent email to the next, one fire after another being extinguished while taking time away from the other projects at hand. Engineers are found responding to urgent, not important emails; however, they have been conditioned to respond immediately taking attention from the essential things and putting them on the next distraction.

Not only are these budgeted hours low or not to scale for each project, but they also don’t account for the hours of wasted meetings the engineers end up attending. For example, engineers get caught up attending other meetings inside the firm that has nothing to do with our portion of the project, or just a small piece at the very end. We find that these types of meetings take the engineer away from the bigger picture of completing the overall project.

·       How do we prioritize these projects?

·       Is it by which deadline is first?

·       Which project manager yells louder

·       What is the order in which we tackle the mounting pile of work on our desk?

Surfboard may not be able to stop the meetings or emails, but the add-in can give back some of that precious time to the engineer and reduce the time controlled the engineer is experiencing.

Budgets

Project budgets are often exceeded due to unforeseen circumstances encountered during the planning and building processes of a project. However, time can be a controlled factor in the professional services company of the firm. Most often we see this occur an “absorption of overhead costs by billable time of technical personnel” at the corporate level but I wanted a better way to improve the risk/reward of consulting managing my time and productivity on each project ("Cost control in consulting engineering firms,” 2005).

Not having enough people per project forces the engineers to find ways to complete projects while not having the manpower needed to adequately perform the way needed to complete multiple projects for the firm. Engineers often find themselves understaffed and under deadline which often means that the individuals they are working with are not satisfied with the project or the engineer. These same engineers also experience increased stress because there is not any help coming or light at the end of the tunnel. Problem solving is essential for Engineers/Designers and necessitates a group of diverse persons working to finish projects under stress. Because of the delays or other significant problems that confront the engineers, they often employ their softskills to get projects complete in a more professional manner while presenting a professional face of the corporation (Short, 2017).

People

A top engineer in a firm earns $125-150,000 which is comparable to other engineering fields, if not a little less. However, the liability is much higher as they stamp / seal construction documents, putting their name that the design meets code and won’t fail.  Risk-reward ratios seem a little off, don't they? Being an engineer, not licensed in automotive, and designing something going into millions of cars often pays more. Let us say something fails; no one person is held responsible. Yet, in construction, the engineer signing their name is the responsible party.

Granted, the engineers are backed by a company; an individual is still signing off on the drawings, saying the design is up to code. Therefore, to improve the risk-reward balance, the engineer of each project must learn to communicate needs and wants to improve productivity at the jobsite and office as needed. At the end of the day, we are responsible for the design and safety of those in the building.

This is where Surfboard shines by helping to cut 25% out of your electrical projects. The software allows the engineer to get through Design Documents in minutes, rather than weeks or months. Because of this the engineer has no more stress, worry, or fear about not hitting a deadline.

Our solution, Surfboard allows your electrical team to get to Design Documents in minutes. Placing lighting, lighting controls, power distribution and fire alarm devices in your Revit model in minutes.

Healthcare Construction

Project after project rolling in and jumping from deadline to deadline causes engineers to become stressed out, overworked, and feel underappreciated. Life in construction is made up of these behaviors and emotions, I get it more than most. I had taken a new job as a senior engineer, and this office was heavy in healthcare construction, this field was something I had not worked on previously. I was thrust into the healthcare world and not just any type of healthcare project, but one of the more complex hospital needs—operating rooms.

The project was a renovation of 30 operating rooms across two hospitals. The phasing alone was complex and complicated and hard to manage as the project manager leading the MEP team. The biggest challenge asked of my company was keeping the majority of rooms open so the hospital could still operate. Did I mention I was also the one managing this project? I was in charge of managing and designing the electrical systems. This was a new client, a new position for me, and new systems to learn how to design. I was over my head with this one. Meaning I was soon to be the owner of many long nights studying codes, learning the systems and design the electrical systems in this OR renovation.

Work-Life Balance

The project went out in mid-January. At the time, I was living in Indianapolis, IN. It is cold, snowy, and a place you would like to get out of and be on a beach somewhere this time of year, which is precisely what I had planned—going on vacation for ten days to Hawaii. Sipping Mai Tai's on the beach is what I was planning on—getting this Operating Room project out the door and enjoying a well-earned vacation and relaxation. Except, it did not quite happen that way.

Two days before I was to get on the plane, I broke out in shingles on my chest and back. Here I was 27 years old, a Senior Engineer, had run a department and now managing MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) teams for healthcare projects, and I now had shingles. My viral infection was likely triggered by stress, since I had not been around anyone with chickenpox. I never had an outbreak of chickenpox personally since I had been given the vaccine as a kid.

If you have not had shingles, let me give a short explanation. Shingles are hemispherical. Meaning it will appear on half of your body. Some people get it on their face, and it can either be front and back or side to side. I had it on the left side of my body, front and back. Shingles are itchy, burning, and overall painful. With a constant burn and itch and the occasional flare of pain, shingles are annoying. Here I am, though, on the beach taking anti-viral medications and Tylenol to deal with the pain.

During this trip, I had time to reflect. To ask myself questions about why I am working so hard in my engineering job that does not have work-life balance and lower pay than other fields of engineering. Why stay in construction? What can I do not let this happen to anyone else? Why do we do it? Why do I stay?

Considering these questions, it is still beautiful to see the impact made on a community. Whether for a healthcare network, school, or manufacturing facility, it is a positive impact and something that will stand for decades to come. This is the beauty of construction. It lasts, withstanding time and nature—more than anything else humans create, buildings and infrastructure last. My goal is to make an impact across the industry that’s as helpful as the buildings we create.

Lingard, Brown, and Bradley explained, “Long and inflexible work hours are the most consistent predictor of work-life conflict among construction employees, particularly those working on-site or in a project office (2007).” The researchers also found that there is sufficient evidence to support alternative work schedules that include high-performance work systems that would provide the availability of work-life balance.

On the beach, this is what I was determined to do. Help the thousands of engineers across the industry not go through what I did. My mission became to give them a better life. Give them the ability to focus on the beauty of construction. Allow engineers to do what they do best, engineer. Calculations and problem-solving. Not the tedious tasks required for each project.

Why should an engineer be drafting? Placing receptacles, especially when there are clear rules to place these devices. The same goes for numerous other devices and project setup

Engineers with billable rates of $150 per hour doing these types of tasks do not make sense. Nevertheless, it happens all the time across the industry. Now, your rates might vary, but you get the point—a valuable employee doing low-value type work.

This is where I saw the highest ability to impact and help engineers. My goal is to reduce the number of hours engineers work and get them back down to a typical workweek of 40 hours per week. Across the industry, most engineers are salaried. Meaning no matter how many hours worked, the engineers are not paid any more or less.

If something could reduce the number of hours, increase productivity, and lower the stress felt in getting projects out, wouldn't this be worth it? My thoughts exactly. Now, how do you go about it? How can this happen?

Years earlier, in 2014, the Occulus Rift, DK2 (Development Kit 2), came out. I was working at an Architecture Engineering firm, and we had applied to receive one. We were one of the few selected and thus began our research and development into visualization.

Honestly, in the beginning, things were clunky. We had a machine specially built with high-end processing, tons of memory to run this virtual reality headset. Still tethered to the machine, we could go into another world. Walk around the buildings we were designing and see them from a first-person perspective rather than the floor and ceiling plans we were used to. As one of the Architects I worked with described them, the GOD view—the zoomed-out view of the building from above—the view no one sees, except God or a drone.

Here we were walking through these buildings, years before they were built. It was AWESOME! During all this R&D, I discovered there was a whole world open to us through software.

This started my journey of personal research, growth, and development of an idea. Years of hiring developers (I am just an electrical engineer after all) to help bring my vision to reality. Years to iterate, refine and develop a useful solution to my own problems designing buildings.

A Planned Solution

In December of 2019, we finally released a solution to help get through the initial design phases. We were automating the layout of lights, receptacles, and light switches. This seemingly primary tool would lay out the back of the house and general lighting throughout a building in one shot. We were taking care of the general-purpose outlets and your switches by the door.

What does this mean to an engineer, to you? Let's take a school or office building. Typical troffers throughout, the outlet on each wall in the offices and a switch by the door. Think of all the hours it would take to do lighting calculations for each room. To layout a receptacle in the center of every wall in every room. Then place a switch by the door. A total of 3-4 receptacles in each room.

Let’s say this initial layout is 25% of a project. 100,000 square foot school/office is budgeted for 437.5 hours for SD/DD. Instead of a narrative, you can now produce a preliminary set of drawings. Through DD = 35% of a project. Taking off 10% to clean up and still produce a set means a savings of 393 hours on this project alone.

These are budgeted hours, and we all know how well this holds up over the long haul. Most projects are over budget on hours. This will save you close to 400 hours. In dollars, say at $100/hr. = $40,000 on this one project alone.

If the design changes, which we all know never happens (insert smiley face here). You can rerun our solution… Surfboard and re-lay out all your lights, receptacles, and switches in a project within minutes.

Surfboard is the name of our solution that is an add-in to Revit. At Kowabunga Studios our solutions save time, increase cash flow, and productivity giving your team a better life and your company a better bottom line.

The name comes from a couple of places; riding the wave of innovation is one. How technology is changing our world, and it is a wave you want to be on. The other is from my being in Maui and seeing the surfers who made it look so easy, so graceful. They let the wave take them for a ride, and the smiles on their faces were fantastic!

The feeling of grace, beauty, and ease is what I wanted to give to other engineers. To have them see and feel the power and ease with which projects can come together. Not the struggle, pain, and anxiety engineers have had on projects. I want it to be easy for all engineers, now and in the future. To allow you, the engineer, to use your brain for actual engineering and problem solving, not these tedious tasks of placing devices in a project.

Surfboard is meant to take you on a wonderful ride. Take you places you want to go and let you enjoy life a little more. Ride the waves you want to ride and spend time with whom you want to spend time with, not chained to your desk away from your friends and family.

I want you to have the beers and enjoy life. Not be too stressed or have too much work not to be able to enjoy life. As engineers, we make a good living but can never enjoy it. Life is meant to be lived and enjoyed. Surfboard is our way of helping make it all possible.

Because it is our mission at Kowabunga Studios to help you grow, develop, and save more time so you can live that better life, we are continuing to improve our Surfboard technology. Since our initial release, we have added the ability to place ceiling-mounted occupancy sensors, fire alarm devices (horn/strobes and smoke detectors) as well as your initial panel placement.

You might be wondering how this all works. How we make this so effortless. Well, it’s because we were in your shoes. We’ve designed millions of square feet of commercial buildings. Lighting is designed and populated using the lumen method to calculate an even illumination across the work surface with just a few technical parameters. Receptacles, ceiling mounted occupancy sensors are placed based on spacing information provided. Fire alarm devices placed per code distances. Switches and panels placed based on how many you choose. Making device placement easy, simple, and straightforward for anyone who has designed commercial buildings before.

Surfboard is a single installation for 2017 through the current year of Revit. We knew the struggles of having to download a specific download for each year of Revit which creates a plug-in for data converting and juggling between the versions and making sure you had software for the newest version year (Zotkin, Ignatova, Zotkina, 2016).  We have one installer for Surfboard, covering all your bases.

Kowabunga Studios keeps increasing our offerings to help you through your projects. In 2020, we made a significant development effort to help everyone save time. Adding Skimboard, a low-voltage solution handling speaker, wireless access points, data, security, and floor boxes.

We will not stop improving and delivering solutions to help you save time. We are not developing window dressing solutions or fancy visualization tools. We are helping you with the nuts and bolts engineering and design few want to tackle. We are doing this because we know your pain. Kowabunga Studios was born out of the stress, anxiety, and tight deadlines you live in daily.

Let us help relieve your tensions through our software solutions.

Evolution of Design

20 years ago, firms were still drafting by hand. Using pen plotters and mylar. Enter the 2000’s and you saw the majority adoption of Architectural desktop and AutoCAD. Enabling faster transmission of base plans and updates. In the 2010’s we’ve seen the vast adoption of Revit and the ushering in of real-time collaboration. Same model, same time, instant updates. No more file updates once a week and missing changes. No more physically redrawing base plans.

Today we are in the age of real-time updates and speed. Owners want a coordinated model and set of drawings delivered faster than ever before. Yet how is your firming going to make good on these promises? Rather than continually breaking them with pushed deadlines, upsetting everyone in the process?

Hire more people? We all know how that is working out with the tight labor pool and low entry into the industry. What other alternatives are there, if you’re going to outperform your competition and not break the promise of the deadlines you’ve made?

There’s only one real alternative and it’s to use automation. To speed up processes of getting information and content in your models. Allowing your team to have better conversations with the owner and other disciplines sooner in the project. Allowing your team to be great at what they do, rather than toiling away at all these tedious tasks.

            Automation and augmenting your team is the only sure way to success in such a short period of time. You’re being paid for a complete product, especially in a fixed fee world. Not the time you put into it. Why not be paid more for less work? It’s possible and Kowabunga Studios has the solution.

 

 

References

Best soft skills to list on a resume. (n.d.). The Balance Careers. https://www.thebalancecareers.com/list-of-soft-skills-2063770

Cost control in consulting engineering firms | Journal of management in engineering | Vol 21, no 4. (n.d.). ASCE Library | Civil Engineering and its Practical Applications. https://ascelibrary.org/doi/pdf/10.1061/%28ASCE%290742-597X%282005%2921%3A4%28189%29

Lingard, H., Brown, K., Bradley, L., Bailey, C., & Townsend, K. (2007). Improving employees’ work-life balance in the construction industry: Project alliance case study. Journal of construction engineering and management, 133(10), 807-815.

Pearce, A. R., & Bulbul, T. The Influence of Internship Participation on Construction Industry Hiring Professionals When Selecting New Hires and Determining Starting Salaries for Construction Engineering Graduates. age, 24, 1.

Zotkin, S. P., Ignatova, E. V., & Zotkina, I. A. (2016). The organization of autodesk revit software interaction with applications for structural analysis. Procedia Engineering, 153, 915-919.