A brief look at a spreadsheet for the planning and documentation of scaffold structures

Continuing my series of posts on some of my areas of work, this post will take a brief look on a specific task requested by a client, in need of a tool to aid them with their planning and documentation of temporary scaffold structures.

Reducing the cost and wanting to deliver a solution, which could be used across their organization, a spreadsheet was presented as a proof of concept of an intuitive way to deliver a standardized report including dynamic figures and verification, all based on the user input.

After an extensive period of development, input validation, tests, structuring and verification of calculations, a simple spreadsheet now allows them to test planned setups and document the static data. The delivered spreadsheet includes dynamic update of drawings and figures and most essential Eurocode compliant calculations, including all basic checks of the structures stability, all in accordance with the Danish national annexes.

Providing each input with both data validation and a short guide (ill. in the screenshot to the right), increases the quality of the input of parameters like dimensions, applied loads, terrain class, type of ledgers and diagonals, etc. used for the calculation and verification of required ballast, the performance of the chosen diagonal pattern and not least a detailed check of the linear performance of each type of component for the specific setup, by comparing it to the metrics of the manufactures "DIBt Zullassung" (German building product approval). An overview of a complete report is shown below.

I hope this post gives you some inspiration on how a prior rather demanding and time-consuming task could be simplified, increasing productivity and structural safety.