The CPCoalition (originally “Construction PDF Coalition”) is the brainchild of co-founders Kyle Hughes and Sasha Reed. As a project engineer for Skanska USA in 2012, Hughes began spreading the benefits of a paperless jobsite, especially after discovering the batch tools in Bluebeam Revu used to automate tedious PDF document control tasks that often took an entire Saturday to complete.  Now they could be completed overnight with the click of a mouse.

While sharing his “Bluebeam magic tricks” with other project teams, Hughes found that certain PDF drawing sets didn’t perform as promised.  Frustrated and confused, Hughes reached out to Reed at Bluebeam to investigate a solution.  While there wasn’t a simple solution to his problem, she did know plenty of Skanska’s competitors that were facing these shared pains.

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With Kyle’s passion and Sasha’s connections, the first in-person meeting of the CPCoalition was held in 2013.  A dozen or so general contractors (GCs) came together from across the US to share PDF drawing best practices and lessons learned. After the one day discussion, It became clear the next meeting would not be productive without the designer’s perspective. ​​

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A year later, the GC veterans were asked to invite any designers that understood our pain points to share how ‘the other half live.’ The collaborative debate between designers and builders produced eye-opening discoveries that led to version 1 of the PDF Guidelines for Construction.

Industry response since the release of the PDF guidelines has been overwhelming. CPCoalition caught the attention of Autodesk during the AGC BIMForum conference in 2015 while sharing the benefits of data-rich PDF deliverables. Because PDF drawing quality often depends on the design workflows and export settings inside Autodesk tools like Revit and AutoCAD, it has remained in the CPCoalition’s best interest to develop a strong relationship. 

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In 2017 we are excited to announce that we have formally submitted for our 501c3 status as an educational non-profit organization and will be accepting donations from technology sponsors in support of our agnostic platform to share digital best practices between Design, Build, Inspect, and Operate (DBIO) professionals. 

Another major step in 2017 will be to rebrand CPCoalition to “Construction               Progress Coalition.” While our primary focus today is still growing the PDF Guidelines for Construction the new title is a better fit with the original vision we defined back       in 2014: 

“To maximize the quality and efficiency of digital handoffs through collaborative guidelines by an adaptive and open-source approach.” 

This small but significant step allows us to continue our focus on addressing the grassroots challenges faced by our Design, Build, Inspect, and Operate (DBIO) professionals.