TLC Engineering Reclaims 200+ Billable Hours Per Designer, Per Year with Real-Time Revit Collaboration

How one of the nation's largest MEP and structural engineering firms made Autodesk Revit feel local across 25 offices — and gave every designer back four to five hours a week — with Panzura CloudFS's hybrid cloud architecture. 

 "I have noticed the speed has increased tremendously. Even faster than our old L: drive."

— A senior designer and Revit-certified professional at TLC

Impact Snapshot

• 200–250 additional billable hours per designer, per year, recovered by eliminating the "dead" time engineers spent waiting on files across sites
• 4–5 hours of productive time reclaimed per designer, every week, through genuinely real-time collaboration between offices
• Revit models that took up to 25 minutes to open across distance now open at local speed — fast enough that designers compared it favorably to their old local drive
• Riverbed WAN accelerators eliminated entirely, for significant annual cost savings, because CloudFS overcomes the latency that accelerators never could
• Zero file collisions across 16 offices through automatic file and byte-range locking, letting designers co-author the same model without overwriting one another
• Snapshot-based disaster recovery and ransomware resilience, with point-in-time file restore that requires no IT intervention

The Challenge: When Distance Turns Revit Into the Bottleneck

Founded in 1955 and headquartered in Orlando, TLC Engineering Solutions is one of Central Florida's largest privately held firms and consistently ranks among the largest MEP and structural engineering practices in the U.S. TLC built its competitive edge on an aggressive delivery model: virtually sharing people and resources across 25 offices from coast to coast, pulling the right expertise onto the right project at the right time, no matter where it sat.

There was just one problem. The very infrastructure meant to enable that collaboration had become its greatest impediment.

Latency no accelerator could beat: Autodesk Revit — one of TLC's core design applications — is notoriously slow between sites. A single Revit model can require up to 15,000 individual file operations just to open, and every one is a there-and-back round trip. Beside a local data center those happen in near real time; stretched across more than 1,000 miles, latency slows everyone. Models that should open in seconds were taking 25 minutes or more, and no WAN accelerator in TLC's network could close the gap. Saving files took even longer — so teams simply couldn't work together on the same files across sites.

Version chaos and IT firefighting: To keep moving, designers resorted to manually merging file versions, piling pressure on IT and introducing exactly the kind of error risk a high-performance engineering firm cannot tolerate. The cumulative "dead" time was hampering production to an unworkable extent — directly threatening the aggressive schedules TLC had committed to on increasingly large and complex projects.

Technical Requirements

• Deliver local-feeling Revit performance across distances of well over 1,000 miles
• Enable multiple designers to work within the same model simultaneously, with no risk of overwrites
• Eliminate manual file synchronization and the version-merging chaos it forced
• Strengthen backup and disaster recovery with rapid, point-in-time restore
• Remove dependence on WAN accelerators that could not solve the underlying latency problem

The Solution: Local-Speed Revit From a Single Source of Truth

After evaluating Panzura CloudFS against Nasuni, TLC concluded that only CloudFS could let remote team members work with Revit models as quickly and seamlessly as if they were sitting side by side. The firm deployed CloudFS to maintain a single authoritative data source while delivering local-feeling performance everywhere.

Local-feeling performance, globally: CloudFS gives each office high-performance local caching against one global namespace, so Revit models open and save at local speed regardless of distance, turning a 25-minute open back into seconds.

Automatic file and byte-range locking: Immediate file and byte-range locking let multiple designers work within the same model at once without overwriting each other. The manual version-merging, and the IT firefighting that came with it, simply stopped.

One source of truth, everywhere: All projects were consolidated onto a common drive, eliminating the need to remap data when switching projects or offices. Traveling staff can now work from any TLC location without changing a setting — they log in, and their work is waiting. CloudFS also protects that data with AI-powered threat control and recovery capabilities, replaces traditional backup with immutable snapshots, letting the firm rest easy that their data is resilient to attack and accidental data loss.

The Result: Time Back, Projects Out the Door, and Happier Engineers

With Panzura CloudFS in their stack, TLC designers regained four to five hours of productive time every week — an additional 200 to 250 billable hours per designer, per year. Projects now ship dramatically faster, freeing TLC to take on more work, larger work, and more ambitious deadlines.

Just as important is the human dividend. The daily frustration of waiting on files disappeared, IT eliminated its Riverbed accelerators for significant annual savings, and the hours once lost reconciling file versions now go toward work that moves the business forward. As one senior designer put it the day after migration: the speed had increased tremendously — faster, even, than the old local drive.