Groundwork started on real jobs at Super Structures GC in Powhatan, Virginia, because the drawings always came last and the number always came late.
A customer comes in with a building in his head. He wants to know what it costs and what it looks like, this week, while he is excited and the bank is listening. The honest answer used to be: a site plan in a few weeks, a floor plan after that, a budget after the drawings, and a design fee before any of it. By then the moment had passed, or the customer had gone to someone who guessed faster.
The second problem was the set itself. Every discipline drawn by a different hand, from a different copy of the plan, and the day one of them changed the others did not. The electrical panel sized for a building that had grown. The sprinkler heads on top of the light fixtures. The civil sheets that never quite showed the pipe.
One model of the building, and every sheet drawn from it. Describe the building and the program lays it out, draws the plans, the elevations, the sections, the details and the schedules, sizes the systems, checks the code, prices the work and writes the specifications. Change the plan and everything follows. The set is ready the same afternoon, and it is a set, not a sketch.
It was built job by job: a hangar, a warehouse addition, a motorcycle dealership on a metal frame, a hardware store with its civil set, a twenty-storey tower to prove the structure held up. Each job taught it something, and each lesson is in the program for the next builder.
Groundwork is software. It drafts preliminary working documents from what you tell it. It is not an architect, not an engineer, and it does not pretend to be. Every set is reviewed, revised as needed and sealed by the licensed professional your project requires before anything is built from it. The program prints that on every sheet, and it means it. What it does is get the professional a set that is already most of the way there, and get you the drawing and the number while the deal is alive.
Groundwork Platform, Inc. is a Delaware corporation with its office in Powhatan, Virginia. It owns the program and brings it to other builders. Super Structures GC, Inc. built it, uses it every day, and is its first customer.
Groundwork is offered to members of the Metal Building Contractors & Erectors Association at a member rate, and the program's crane and bracing plans grew out of the questions erectors ask on every job.