New Version Improves Industrial and Commercial Construction Project Workflows through Better Interoperability, Control over Drawings and Usability

SUNNYVALE, Calif., March 12, 2015 — (PRNewswire) —  Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB) today introduced  Tekla® Structures 21, the latest version of its Building Information Modeling (BIM) software for the engineering and construction markets. With advancements in interoperability, drawing control, usability and performance, Tekla Structures 21 improves industrial and commercial construction project workflows across construction disciplines. The new version delivers benefits to structural steel and precast concrete designers, detailers and fabricators, concrete contractors and general contractors, and enhanced collaboration with Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing (MEP) design engineers, architects and others.

"After a decade in use, Tekla Structures continues to further the evolution of BIM from an experimental to an essential part of designing, engineering and building all types of buildings and structures," said Risto Raty, executive vice president of Tekla and general manager of Trimble Buildings' Structures Division. "Tekla Structures 21 reduces the time between concept and construction by enabling more advanced project team collaboration and productivity—enabling free flowing communication between all project stakeholders for more efficient design and building processes."

Enhanced Collaboration and Workflow

Tekla Structures 21 is fully interoperable with popular industrial plant design software such as AVEVA PDMS and Intergraph Smart 3D. This high level of bi-directional integration speeds up and improves the transfer of model data by providing a higher level of detail, better information transfer and change management. Improved integration between Tekla Structures and Autodesk's Revit Architecture and Revit MEP allows for better collaboration, enhanced control and change management through Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) file exchanges. Tekla's automated model and drawing export function saves time and makes downstream workflows smoother. In addition, Tekla Structures improves import and export functions with Trimble® SketchUp.

Reference model handling is also improved, making collaboration over changes much easier and providing better control over change management with IFC files. Tekla's IFC change management allows for the effective detection, management and reaction to changes in IFC models, and allows reference models to be added to a list and grouped.

Raty added, "By providing tight integration with other popular BIM software—as well as our own analysis and design software Tekla Structural Designer—and incorporating deep support for IFC, Tekla Structures 21 allows project team members from all disciplines to work together to address potential problems during the modeling stage, when they can be inexpensively and expediently addressed. These process improvements pave the way for successful projects where everyone wins."

The platform-neutral IFC file format is a key component of Open BIM, a broad-based approach to the collaborative design, construction and operation of buildings based on open standards and workflows.

As a "Trimble Connected" product, Tekla Structures 21 leverages the Trimble Connect collaboration environment for design, engineering and construction projects. Based on Gehry Technologies' renowned GTeam^™ software acquired by Trimble in in 2014, Trimble Connect enables teams to access and manage project data via a cloud platform. 

Tekla Structures 21 offers several other improvements and resources:

• Drawing control: provides greater control over the drawings. It simplifies the processes of navigating, printing and viewing the properties of drawings. Users also can now give customized company-specific dimensions to their own standard parts, such as bolts and embeds. Tekla's view level control of dimensioning automates working with assemblies like handrails and cast units.
• User-friendly modeling: improved direct modification makes modeling more intuitive and simple with "what you see is what you get" modifications. Drawing construction lines, circles and points and placing custom parts is straightforward, and editing the position is easy and immediate.

Two new services have also been introduced concurrent with Tekla Structures 21:

• Tekla Model Sharing: a service allowing project team members to work on the same project from any location or time zone, for faster and more flexible project delivery.
• Tekla Warehouse: a free online library of Tekla Structures modeling tools, intelligent parts and templates to help users achieve more efficient workflows and higher quality projects.

Availability

Tekla Structures 21 is available now. For more information and to download Tekla Structures 21, visit: www.teklastructures.com. 

About Tekla

Tekla's Building & Construction business is part of Trimble Buildings, which is focused on technology solutions that improve collaboration, efficiency and accuracy across the Design-Build-Operate (DBO) lifecycle of buildings. Tekla drives the evolution of digital information models to provide greater competitive advantage to the construction, infrastructure and energy industries. Tekla has customers in over 100 countries, offices in over 20 countries and a global partner network.

Information on Tekla solutions can be found at:   www.tekla.com. Details about Trimble Buildings' complete DBO portfolio are available at:  http://buildings.trimble.com. 

About Trimble

Trimble applies technology to make field and mobile workers in businesses and government significantly more productive. Solutions are focused on applications requiring position or location—including surveying, construction, agriculture, fleet and asset management, public safety and mapping. In addition to utilizing positioning technologies, such as GPS, lasers and optics, Trimble solutions may include software content specific to the needs of the user. Wireless technologies are utilized to deliver the solution to the user and to ensure a tight coupling of the field and the back office. Founded in 1978, Trimble is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif.

For more information, visit:  www.trimble.com. 

GTRMB

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SOURCE Trimble