National Design Consultancy (NDC) has written its first specification using NBS Chorus. The platform has been successfully rolled out across the business, and it’s helping the team of engineers to work more efficiently across multiple offices.

National Design Consultancy provides building services engineering consultancy, specialising in mechanical and electrical design. The company made the decision to move to NBS following the announcement that their existing specification tool, NES, was not going to be supported after December 2019.

NDC have offices across the UK so they needed a specification solution that could be used by the whole project team across multiple locations. They needed access to a full suite of M&E content, classified in Uniclass 2015 and Autodesk Revit for their modelling needs. We caught up with James Sincock, Drawing Services Manager at NDC, to ask how they are finding the transition to NBS Chorus.

What are the main benefits that you’ve experienced from using NBS Chorus?

We have found the NBS software to be intuitive and easy to use. The guidance notes have made the transition from the NES software much easier. Also, knowing the content is always up-to-date helps to give us peace of mind.

The ability to develop the specification and the model at the same time, in the same environment, is invaluable.

How have your rolled out NBS Chorus in your business? 

Initially, the team watched the ‘NBS Chorus for Building Services Engineers’ webinar, which gave us a high-level understanding of how to use the platform. We then had a personalised demo from our account manager, which helped us to start using the platform.

As the product is so intuitive, we didn’t have any problems getting started, but the course of e-Learning available is a great resource to refer to if needed.  

What project or business challenges has NBS Chorus has helped you to solve? 

Chorus has provided us with a cost-effective solution which is helping us to work more effectively, and therefore saving us lots of time to work on other projects. We’ve only used Chorus on one project so far but it’s proving to be a great tool. 

What would you do if you didn’t have NBS? 

We would spend a lot of time writing manual specifications with considerably less standard clauses included. We would also being put ourselves at risk with content that is potentially out of date.