You ran the clash test. Navisworks did its job, and now you're looking at 800 rows named Clash1 through Clash800, each one a red dot in a viewer and a decision waiting to be made.
This is the moment most coordination workflows quietly fall apart. Detection is a solved problem — Navisworks has done it well for years. What happens after detection is where the hours go: renaming, sorting, deciding what matters, chasing the right consultant, and keeping three versions of the truth (the model, the spreadsheet, the email thread) from drifting apart.
Here's a workflow that treats post-detection management as its own discipline, because it is one.
Step 1 — Publish the results out of the viewer
A clash test living only inside one coordinator's Navisworks session isn't a coordination record. It's a private to-do list.
The first move is to publish the clash test to a shared platform, so every clash gets a stable identity that survives re-runs. In ClashWise, every clash in a published set gets a permanent number — #1, #47, #312 — that stays attached to it for the life of the set. When someone says "look at #47" in a meeting, everyone means the same clash, this week and next week.
Publishing also means the model itself stays untouched. The plugin reads your clash tests; it never modifies your model files.
Step 2 — Name every clash so a human can read the list
"Clash847" tells you nothing. "Cable tray vs structural beam — Level 03, Grid C/4" tells you who needs to be in the room.
Renaming clashes by hand is the single most mechanical task in coordination, which makes it the first thing worth automating. AI clash naming reads the element metadata on both sides of every clash — discipline, element type, level, grid — and writes a descriptive title in your team's working language. ClashWise does this in 11 languages with six naming standards to choose from, and it's group-aware, so a grouped clash gets a title that describes the group rather than one arbitrary member.
The payoff isn't just aesthetics. A readable list can be scanned, sorted, and delegated. An unreadable one has to be opened clash by clash.
Step 3 — Group the noise before you triage it
Two hundred clashes are often forty issues. The same duct crossing the same beam run produces a stripe of near-identical results, and triaging them individually is how a two-hour review becomes a two-day one.
Group related clashes before anyone starts making calls. Whether you group in Navisworks before publishing or on the platform afterwards, the goal is the same: one issue, one entry, one owner.
Step 4 — Let rules assign priority, owner, and status
Most triage decisions are not judgment calls. Mechanical vs structural on a plant level routes to the mechanical consultant at high priority — every time, on every project. That's a rule, and rules can run themselves.
This is the core of AI clash management: you define the matrix once — discipline pair, conditions, resulting priority, owner, and status — and every new clash checks itself against it the moment it's published. The clashes that match a rule arrive pre-routed. The ones that don't land in an unassigned bucket at the top of your list, which is exactly where your attention should go.
The result is consistency you can't get from people. The same rules apply whether the senior coordinator or the new hire published the file.
Start a free 14-day trial and run this workflow on one of your own clash tests — it's the fastest way to see which steps your current process is paying for by hand.
Step 5 — Track it where everyone can see it
The spreadsheet-emailed-on-Friday model has one fatal flaw: it's already stale on Friday afternoon.
A live dashboard — open clashes by discipline, by level, by owner, by age — replaces the weekly reporting ritual with a URL. Project directors and consultants who don't have a Navisworks seat can see the state of coordination without asking you to produce it. In ClashWise these views are shareable with password protection, so "can you send me the latest numbers" stops being part of your job.
When the coordination meeting itself happens, run it against the live data. ClashWise coordination sessions record every status, priority, and owner change made while the session is active, and write the minutes for you — decisions and action items included.
Step 6 — Sync the verdicts back into Navisworks
Every decision made outside the model has to come back to the model, or you've built a second source of truth that will eventually contradict the first.
Bi-directional sync pushes statuses and assignments from the platform back into the Navisworks file, so the coordinator opening Clash Detective on Monday sees the same picture as the dashboard. Re-running the clash test doesn't destroy anything — existing clashes keep their identity, resolved ones show as resolved, and newly detected clashes appear as new entries.
What this looks like as a week
- Monday: federate, run clash tests, publish. Naming and routing happen automatically on publish.
- Tuesday: triage the exceptions — the unassigned bucket, not the whole list.
- Wednesday: coordination meeting against the live dashboard, session minutes recorded as you go.
- Thursday: consultants work their assigned lists; you chase the stragglers the dashboard surfaces.
- Friday: re-run the tests, sync, and the cycle's bookkeeping is already done.
The mechanical work — naming, sorting, routing, reporting — disappears into the tooling. What's left is the part that actually needs a coordinator: the judgment calls.
If you want a sense of what this looks like when it goes wrong, we've written up the 10 most common Navisworks clash mistakes we see in real workflows — most of them live in the gap between detection and management.
Ready to try it end to end? Download the ClashWise plugin for Navisworks Manage 2024–2027 and publish your next clash test instead of exporting it.
Try ClashWise free for 14 days — no credit card, full access, cancel in-app.