The use of a scheduling tool is key in efforts related to planning, designing and other objectives through and including operational needs of an indoor shooting range. The fastest way to waste both time and money is to fail to plan your indoor range design process. What we never do is start with design itself. More on the process of designing an indoor range in another post. The process will include not only the floor plan design but also the site plan and ultimately the municipal approvals process. Schedules with Gantt views that include dependency features will allow for quick adjustments when needed…not if, but when. Time and again more money and more time is required to navigate through the processes and relationships than expected to build a quality indoor shooting range facility. The vast majority of indoor shooting ranges are ground-up construction and fall into the class of commercial real estate facilities. Useful schedules will include several hundred line items not including the construction schedule a general contractor will work from.
Also, the project schedule should be one of if not the document from which all communication flows. Doing so will aid in the framing of expectations among the design team, shooting range equipment vendors, shooting range HVAC design-build firm not to mention the GC, lender and investors.
Our indoor shooting range projects typically have a half dozen schedules that flow into reports and ultimately into a single dashboard to speed the quality of the communication, track critical paths and document milestones. There are several scheduling tools available today. We use those that permit mobile use in addition to desktop, communication with team members, the ability to store files of range design documents, proposals and other documents, as well as send alerts in advance of important events.
From the experience of having established many indoor shooting ranges around the country with involvement in every step from concept to cash register, know that it is a complex process. Range Development Services, LLC exists to guide, recommend, and advocate for new indoor shooting range facilities success. The knowledge of when to spend money and equally important, when not to is an art and a science given the unique conditions of a site, project funding, the skill sets of the owner / sponser, the approval and zoning process of a given municipality; and more.