Getting More From Navisworks Timeliner

BimSens has a couple of overlooked feature targeted at enhancing the Timeliner experience in Navisworks: it can facilitate building the links to the 3D automatically, add codes to the program that are not supported through Timeliner default synchronization, calculate tasks progress in complex scenario with multiple objects and weightings…

1. Bring Activity Codes from P6

While User Fields go a long way adding extra data to the programme in P6, they are free input values, uncontrolled, and planners will often prefer Activity Codes over them, as they can be predefined hierarchical lists. One problem when it comes to 4D in Navisworks, Timeliner doesn’t support Activity Codes (yet).

BimSens fills that gap with its ‘Generic Transfer to Timeliner‘ allowing you to directly match Timeliner tasks to objects in the View:

• Load your P6 programme in Timeliner,
• load the same programme in BimSens using the Primavera P6 Web Service connection,
• setup the transfer for the required codes, and voilà.

2. Automate 4D

Timeliner auto-linking rules are brilliant, but it needs a property on your 3D models or selection sets with names that match Timeliner tasks fields. If you have to set the property or build the selection sets manually in the first place, that’s a lot of manual work for an ‘auto-‘ something isn’t it?

Well, the good news is that if your model is already linked to a BimSens data source, you can transfer properties from the source onto the object in the model and use this to synchronize Timeliner automatically. So think about this upfront when you setup your data source, it is worth the effort. Integration, integration, integration!

3. Report Progress

One of the most sophisticated data transfer between BimSens and Navisworks is also the most powerful: the ‘Progress Report to Timeliner‘. It allows you to set progress of Timeliner tasks based on attached objects with all the configuration settings you need to customize the calculation:

• Object filtering to only use some of the attached objects
• rules for deciding task partial progress and completion
• weighting of attached objects based on properties from the View such as concrete volumes or weight
• rules to forecast remaining duration

Using the Timeliner csv export you can then push this calculated progress back to your planning software or database of choice.

So what? So you can use BimSens 3D interface to have users input progress for each component on site, then use this report to calculate the progress of the associated activities in your programme. Sweet.