November 2021 Product Release - Finance, Design Library, Design Compare

Giraffe is built to empower its users with data to make informed decisions to build better cities and shape our world. It does this by utilizing massings and designs to inform and automate calculations that span feasibility, sustainability and livability, which are stored as accessible data for our users to leverage.

The release of Design Library, Design Compare and Finance continues to build upon data accessibility and empowers our users with access to capitalize on it.

Design Library

Design Library allows you to easily access, manage and organize all of your past massings and designs from a single place. Easily re-use past buildings, designs or layouts in new projects. Maintain clean libraries for ease of use within your organization with clear naming conventions and search capabilities.

What’s new?

Giraffe is capable of collecting, storing and providing access to all of your designs within your Giraffe projects. Your design library works as a memory bank for all your designs and associated data from your accessible projects within your workspace. This new feature is part of Canvas.

Why is this important?

This is important for a number of reasons. First, utilizing your past buildings de-risks your investment. If you’re reusing previous delivered designs, you have a concrete knowledge of what’s gone in before that can set a precedent. This includes the people you’ve worked with and the investment required, which accelerates the process tremendously.

If you’re a commodity architect, or developer, you can capitalize on accelerating the process even further. With your design and functionality cemented, you’re capable of quickly identifying opportunities with site context and your existing feasibility specifications.

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Design Compare

Design Compare provides users with a checklist of elements from previous projects. Allowing users to compare and contrast metrics of your design.

What’s new?

The Design Compare app in Giraffe allows you to compare the current project with a reference project. Giraffe will automatically generate a table, comparing the current project with another of your projects as a reference.

The comparison will allow you to see geometry counts, Gross floor area (GFA) or Net Floor Area (NFA) of the two projects side by side, grouped by Usage or another attribute of your choosing. This new feature is available as an add-on.

Why is this important?

Design Compare provides you with the capability to easily compare and contrast metrics of your design with another project as you draw. Allowing you to see and compare iterative designs and view the variances on any property of a design element.

In addition to using this as an opportunity for comparison, you’re also able to use this as a benchmark or template for future projects.

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Finance

Finance turns a Giraffe design into a detailed, categorized cost and income breakdown that looks and feels like your proforma.

What’s new?

Giraffe has greatly expanded the functionality of the previous iteration of Finance. You’re now capable of developing more accurate detailed visibility for your feasibility studies.

Finance now provides you with access to all the numbers you’d typically use in a spreadsheet, like areas, lengths, building footprints, and facades, that are directly from your design.

In addition to this enhanced data accessibility, now you can assign costs and categories to these build elements. This equation of build elements, costs and categories is organized and managed with Line Items.

There are multiple ways to create Line Items, in order to ensure you’re able to build an accurate budget. You’re able to assign costs to individual Usages, applied at the project level; as a Site Line Item, applied at the site level; or as a Derivative Line Item, based on either the total cost or total income of a project.

This interconnectivity between design and data is paramount in working with speed, providing Giraffe users with real-time updated information with any changes made to the project.

Why is this important?

Acquiring this level of detail can be arduous and costly. Previously, you may have paid thousands per design option and you may have needed upwards of a dozen. This may have stymied your ability to vet all your worthwhile options or hindered your creativity.

Real estate developments’ viability hinges on detail. Feasibility is made up of up to hundreds of line items that have previously been dependent on antiquated manual processes. Manual processes are prone to inaccuracy and rely too heavily on individual users for perfection. Inevitably leading to omissions like forgotten costs or fees, or dropped prep work like site grading. With Finance, Giraffe provides an extra layer of assurance and confidence. Once you’ve built and perfected your budget, you’re able to simply pull it into new projects to re-use and update as needed.

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Connected functionality

The release of these three features is especially exciting because they work together. Their collective impact massively accelerates your organization’s ability to scale cohesively.

Design Library and Finance work together and create powerful relationships between your projects. Unlocking the ability to import design elements and their attributed Usage information. Saving countless hours of redundant work.

Design Compare and Design Library work together to import various standard design elements (e.g. classroom, building core, penthouse) into multiple projects and then compare them.

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North America

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