We are excited to welcome Carrie Ann Swift to the Tocci team as an Assistant Project Manager/Industrial Hygienist. Carrie Ann has worked with such companies as Covino Environmental Associates, Environmental Health and Engineering at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, totaling over 15 years of industrial hygiene and environmental consulting experience. In her spare time, she enjoys visiting Boston’s North Shore beaches, farms, parks, and playgrounds with her four-year-old son.

Carrie Ann’s professional background includes consulting for healthcare facilities, life science research laboratories, colleges/universities, public schools, and commercial offices. She specializes in such areas as EHS risk management, exposure assessment, and hazardous materials and microbial remediation. For the new Lunder Building at MassGeneral Hospital, Carrie Ann provided ICRA monitoring, laboratory and building decommissioning, and hazardous materials remediation and consulting services. Additionally, she delivered EHS risk management consulting services to BioMed Realty at the Center for Life Science|Boston in the Longwood Medical Area. Carrie Ann’s extensive experience with industrial hygiene for healthcare and life sciences adds additional capability to Tocci’s projects within those sectors.

In our quest to find and purchase a laser scanner, we have been researching products and companies. This morning, Pete Abraham from FARO provided us with a demo of the company’s “Focus 3D” scanner. Astonishingly lightweight and compact, this new generation of “phase” laser scanners captures an incredible amount of 3D point cloud data in a relatively short amount of time. Pair that with its dashing good looks and touch-screen operation, and we’ve got ourselves something to pine over.

We’ll take some time to think it over–but during that time, go ahead and watch 30 seconds of it at work. Notice the rotating lens in the middle of the unit capturing 360º photos of the space to assign accurate color information overlaid onto the previously stored point cloud data.

Our BIMForum brigade is back, and the office is lively and full. Yesterday, Pierce Reynoldson, VDC Project Coordinator and Kristen Tomlinson, Project Manager, pitched us their perspectives on the varied presentations and events at BIMForum this year, providing some insight into what they learned. We all gathered in the conference room and heard a recap on just about everything: from a boat tour and James Timberlake’s keynote address, to the BIMForum’s version of SNL’s “Point/Counterpoint.”

Afterward, we all gathered outside for a  BBQ, complete with delicious chicken, sides, cupcakes, and of course, great company and bocce.

IPD: shared risk, shared reward. Looks like it’s catching on. McCarthy Building Companies out of St. Louis, MO, have just announced a project at Children’s Hospital Colorado, which will be delivered with an IPD agreement. The constructs of IPD always motivate the team to higher efficiency. On Children’s Hospital Colorado, the team chose to forego the shop drawing and submittal process and prompt the structural engineer (S.A. Miro) to provide detailing services. Collaboration allows team members the opportunity to do work that they normally wouldn’t, simply because it’s good for the project.

Thus far, IPD projects have been most prevalent in the healthcare industry, like our Marlborough Hospital Cancer Pavilion project.

Check out the full IPD article here.

Last week the Marlborough team managed to fight off an increase in the RTU size from 50 to 60 tons. At the beginning of the week the mechanical engineers informed the team that they had been using glazing values for triple glazing, which had since been switched to double glazing earlier during a budget validation, deeming curtain wall unaffordable.

Tocci put into motion a search for a double pane glass which would meet the requirements to keep the unit as currently sized, avoiding larger ductwork, more money for mechanical equipment, dropped ceilings, and compromised aesthetics throughout the whole building. Luckily, the labor cost of having to coordinate the mechanical changes across the entire project was also avoided.