Leading North American precast/prestressed concrete companies have invested major efforts and resources to spawn the development of intelligent parametric three-dimensional modeling software solutions for their industry. The executive decision to take this course of action was based on the expectation that the technology would provide benefits throughout the precast business process. Initial experience with prototype modeling systems is beginning to confirm earlier expectations regarding productivity gains and error reduction, although adoption of the systems is still in its early stages. This paper enumerates the various direct and indirect benefits that have been identified and assessed to date and provides a conservative set of benchmarks that can be applied as implementation takes place. Some of the benefits have also been evaluated in economic terms, based on current industry benchmarks of productivity and error rates. Based on these assessments, an example of a large precast company’s target evaluation of the economic benefit it expects to derive during the first four years of adoption is presented.
