IMPROVING WORKFLOWS AND EFFICIENCY FOR VECTORWORKS USERS

Pegasus Group’s goal was to significantly improve the user experience for designers and engineers in Vectorworks

Overview

Pegasus Group solve planning and development problems for clients across the UK. Their design and planning teams carry out extensive work in Vectorworks and continually run into multiple workflow issues.

They came to Heracon knowing they had a number of workflow challenges that were impacting efficiency, but weren’t sure what the right solution would look like. We worked closely with their senior design engineers to uncover the major pain points and to build, test and deploy a solution across the business.


Services

Plugin Development, Workflow Improvements

Challenges


  • 7 key areas for improvement were identified

  • Changing CAD system to an alternative provider was not an option

  • All changes must be built into Vectorworks as custom plugins

  • The plugins must be distributable across the company to ensure consistency across all teams

Outcomes


  • We built a Zone of Theoretical Visibility tool allowing designers to quickly iterate their designs without exporting data into external ZTV tools such as ArcGIS.

  • An advanced data explorer tool was designed to enable searching and manipulation of Vectorworks objects, surpassing the capability of the existing Vectorworks tools, significantly improving workflow efficiency.

  • We built an export tool that allows complex designs to be exported and subsequently imported into AutoCAD without laborious manual file modification.

  • Across all tools, there is an estimated 15-25% reduction in design team time across the lifespan of a project for the business.

Heracon have been great to work with throughout this project and the work that they have produced has had a huge impact on our day to day workflows.
— Sophie Entwisle, Landscape Architect, Pegasus Group

Discovery and kick-off workshop

01

Our engagement with Pegasus began with a collaborative workshop designed to surface key areas for improvement, define project goals and understand the overall vision for improving workflows.

We worked closely with the Pegasus team to prioritise the development of the Vectorworks plugins to ensure that they would meet the needs of teams across the business once completed.

All plugins were built bespoke from the ground up and tested on real scenarios and data directly within Vectorworks. We utilised the Vectorworks SDK to build first class plugins, that behave as though they are shipped as part of the Vectorworks product. For tools such as Zone of Theoretical Visibility (ZTV), we compared against real results from real projects to ensure the plugin closely matched the output of other tools such as ArcGIS. The ZTV tool now allows engineers and designers to quickly simulate ZTV results for their projects directly within Vectorworks.

ZTV is a tool that simulates a developments (such as housing or a warehouse) visibility across the surrounding landscape. The associated image indicates the visibility of the red boundary and the visible areas are highlighted in dark blue.

Development

02

Ultimately the plugins package has been rolled out across the business to all designers and engineers enabling them to have a significantly improved user experience within Vectorworks. Not only have projects seen a significant time saving, the plugins have also brought consistency across the business.

Results

03

Want to find out more about our Vectorworks offerings?

Book a call
Previous
Previous

Tavora

Next
Next

E-Commerce