Brock's 3D scaffold model replaced 1,400+ standby hours with <25

A contractor on a three-month industrial project planned to keep a three-person scaffold crew on standby for the entire job, waiting for the field changes everyone assumed would come. Brock Group built a 3D model of the scope instead, and nearly every access conflict was resolved before a frame went up, according to a BIC Magazine article on the company's Brock Pulse program. One minor modification was needed after erection.

BIC Magazine reports the model replaced more than 1,400 budgeted standby hours with under 25 hours of rework. The magazine adds that better coordination improved productivity for every contractor on the job. For an owner or turnaround manager, that is the difference between paying a crew to wait and paying a crew to build.

That project is the case Enrique Zavala, Director of Technical Services and Innovation at Brock Group, and Brent Roscoe, the company's Chief Operating Officer, make in a MarketScale Studio segment. Soft craft, the industry's label for scaffolding and the access and support work that serves the mechanical and electrical trades, has historically been the last thing scheduled on a project. Both executives want it in the model from day one.

The tooling behind that argument is now documented product material rather than a custom workaround. In a March 2026 post on its own site, scaffold software vendor Avontus published a step-by-step workflow for coordinating scaffold designs inside Autodesk Navisworks, the coordination tool it says is widely used on chemical plants and LNG projects. A September 2025 study in Elsevier's Advanced Engineering Informatics then measured what real-time project data does to cost and schedule forecasting. Brock has put its own name on the combination and calls the program Brock Pulse.

Scaffolding scheduled last means its constraints surface in the field

The cost of that habit lands on other trades. Zavala explains that the later scaffolding is planned, the less chance there is to shape how pipefitters, electricians and insulators reach their work, and an unplanned scaffold can create constraints or delays for the activities that follow it. He describes himself as someone who executes better when he can see the scope, and a model of any scope of work lets him and his team bring their field knowledge to a job well before crews arrive.

The exposure is large. Researchers writing for IAARC in 2017 cited OSHA figures that 65% of construction workers use scaffolding frequently. The paper, by Chung-Wei Feng and Szu-Wei Lu and published by the International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction (IAARC), also notes that scaffolding, as a temporary facility, is usually not developed in the BIM model at all, which leaves scaffold hazards hard to identify and analyze in advance.

That finding is the first complication for Brock's thesis. The modeling tools exist, but the default practice the paper describes is to leave temporary works out of the model. Brock's position is that the gap is the opportunity: the scaffold contractor that models earliest shapes everyone else's access.

A scaffold design enters the master model as a DWG or i-model file

BIM, building information modeling, is a shared 3D model in which each element carries data such as size, material and schedule position, so structural, piping and electrical designs can be checked against one another. The BIC Magazine article describes Brock's 3D modeling as a set of tools: computer-aided design programs for scaffold design, BIM software to simulate construction and resolve clashes, a scaffold management system that tracks components, field software for labor and quality, and the ERP system and reporting dashboards on top.

Brock does not name the specific platforms it runs or the file format it hands to general contractors in the interview. The vendor material shows one common path. Avontus says in its March 2026 post that scaffold designs export as DWG or i-model files into Navisworks, where they sit alongside structure, piping and equipment and can be moved and resized in context.

Clash detection is the model equivalent of walking the job with a tape measure. The software flags where a temporary scaffold leg or ledger occupies the same space as a pipe rack or a permanent steel member before anyone orders material. Avontus adds that Navisworks' TimeLiner tool links model elements to schedule logic, so a team can see what exists when and plan erection and dismantle dates around other trades, and the vendor claims in its own comparison guide that its software cuts drawing and counting time by up to 90% against AutoCAD.

Both DWG and i-model are proprietary CAD formats; neither is IFC, the Industry Foundation Classes, the open format any BIM tool can read and that many owners specify for model handover. An owner who requires IFC or COBie deliverables should ask the scaffold contractor exactly how its scaffold models arrive in the federated model and who maintains them as the design changes.

OSHA's load rules do not change when the scaffold is drawn in 3D

Whatever the model says, the scaffold has to carry its load under federal rules. OSHA's construction standard for scaffolds is 29 CFR 1926 Subpart L, and Appendix A to that subpart publishes scaffold specifications as a non-mandatory starting point for design. The agency states that the employer remains responsible for designing and assembling the system so it meets the capacity requirements of § 1926.451(a), and that components outside the appendix tables must be designed to that section and loaded according to § 1926.451(d)(1).

OSHA's appendix lets a full-thickness 2 by 10 plank span 10 feet at 25 pounds per square foot. The same table cuts the span to 6 feet at 75 pounds per square foot, and it rates fabricated platforms as light duty at 25 pounds per square foot, medium at 50 and heavy at 75. For allowable spans the appendix points to paragraph 5 of ANSI A10.8-1988, the Scaffolding Safety Requirements consensus standard published by the American National Standards Institute.

Model-driven planning does not change those numbers. What it changes is where the compliance documentation comes from. In their 2017 paper, Feng and Lu built a series of Dynamo modules, scripts that automatically generate the scaffold system inside the BIM model from the planning requirements, and then derived safety checklists with 3D location information from that model, so a safety manager is no longer translating a written regulation onto a 2D drawing by hand.

Roscoe ties the same shift to behavior. Bringing soft craft in early with BIM design collaboration, he says, drives planning and also drives a safety culture and a differentiation from a safety standpoint. The BIC Magazine article gives the operational version: visual work plans let crews see erection and dismantling sequences, so hazards are identified during planning rather than execution and work areas are less congested.

Laser scans give the takeoff real geometry, if someone can run the scanner

A material takeoff is the count of standards, ledgers, planks and couplers a scaffold needs, and it has traditionally been estimated from 2D drawings and a site walk, then padded with a contingency. The BIC Magazine article says Brock's software generates material quantities directly from the 3D model, which it credits with reducing excess inventory and rental requirements. The model gets its geometry from laser scanning and drone capture, producing what the article calls a digital twin that reflects actual as-built field conditions.

The mechanism matters in an older plant because the as-built rarely matches the drawings, and a scan captures what the drawings miss. The article frames the result as a change of question, from how to solve a problem in the field to how to prevent it altogether.

Here the second complication arrives. Glasgow Caledonian researchers found in June 2024 that laser scanning with BIM needs specialized equipment and skills. Their case study in the journal Buildings, published by MDPI, reported that the integration significantly improved data accuracy on a live project that had not been BIM-based, while site obstructions complicated data capture and the skills gap limited how easily other teams could repeat it.

Neither OSHA's appendix nor the Buildings study sets a scan resolution or tolerance for a scaffold takeoff. An owner comparing scaffold bids is left to ask each contractor what resolution it scans at and how it checks the model against the field.

Routine, in that reading, is a staffing decision as much as a technology one. The contractor that trains scan operators and modelers now is the one for whom the skills gap the Glasgow study found has closed by the time owners expect it.

Live dashboards fail on manual data entry before they fail on software

An ERP system, enterprise resource planning, is the software a contractor runs its costs, payroll, materials and billing through. Roscoe's end state is scaffold performance data flowing into Brock's ERP and back out as live analytics, so productivity and efficiency factors are read while the job runs instead of reconciled after it closes.

The BIC Magazine article shows the owner-facing side. Scaffold management system dashboards shared with owners, EPCs, construction teams and trades promote transparency and collaborative decisions, the article says, with the caveat that its sample dashboard is for illustration only.

Whether live data actually improves forecasts is a tested question. A September 2025 Elsevier study found real-time data integration improved forecasting accuracy across four construction case studies. Kambiz Radman and colleagues, writing in Advanced Engineering Informatics, compared those four projects, run under a framework they call RealCONs that automates data flow from BIM, cloud project platforms and site, against four run the conventional way.

The comparison used earned value management and earned schedule management, the methods that measure work completed against budget and planned dates. On those metrics the RealCONs projects showed better schedule adherence and cost management as well as forecasting, confirmed with Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. The same study names the obstacle: inefficient data acquisition and reliance on manual data entry are what delay real-time analysis and notifications.

Adoption is still partial. In an August 2026 post on its own site, BIM services firm United-BIM cited industry surveys putting digital twin implementation at about 52% of AEC leaders and near 67% among owners and facility managers, with AI in project processes at roughly 27% of AEC firms. By the post's own figures, the practices Roscoe expects to be standard are common among owners and far from universal among contractors.

Modular construction pulls the access question even earlier

Stick build means assembling piping, steel and equipment piece by piece at the site. Modular means fabricating larger blocks in a shop and setting them in place. Zavala's point is that when a customer mixes the two, a scaffold contractor that can see the whole project in the model can understand where the modules land, analyze the interfaces and plan access for the stick-built remainder instead of reacting to it.

For an owner or EPC writing the next turnaround or capital scope, the questions to put to a scaffold bidder follow directly from the evidence above.

• Which format the scaffold model is delivered in, and whether it drops into the federated model for clash checks and 4D sequencing.
• Who on the contractor's staff runs the scanner and builds the model, given the skills gap the Glasgow Caledonian study documented.
• Whether the performance dashboard pulls from the contractor's ERP and field systems, or from a spreadsheet updated by hand.

The signal Roscoe points to is the day model-driven takeoffs and scaffold design stop winning bids on their own, because every bidder is expected to bring them. The milestone on Brock's side is the ERP integration he describes, with live analytics on the other side of it.