BIM: From Work Stages A to M

It was standing room only at The Building Centre yesterday morning for NLA’s and NBS’s follow-up to last years ‘Building Information Modelling (BIM): Are you ready for the digital switchover?’.

I was sadly unable to get to the first third of the morning, but I know theNBS.com will be producing a more complete write-up of the morning which I will be linking to here as soon as it’s available. I would just like to flag up some of my highlights from the morning.

The first speaker I caught was David Hines of Populous Architects, who was covering stages F, G & H (Pre-construction). Populous do lots of work with Sports Stadia and the example highlighted today was the Aviva Stadium in Ireland. The design and build of this complex project, consisting of 8,999 tonnes of steelwork and 62,000 fixing points, was made possible using BIM. The nature of the complex mullions, and their positions mean they had to be drilled individually and drawings produced from the BIM files made this a much simpler process, allowing elements to be prefabricated. All in all, BIM has been a huge learning process for Populous, but has had its benefits.

Next up, Dr. C. C. Millard of Balfour Beatty looking at Stages J-K (BIM on site). Balfour Beatty used BIM for Heathrow Terminal 2b. Chris defined BIM as “an end to end delivery methodology”. There seems to be lots of definitions doing the rounds and I think this is one of my favourites. BIM allowed the team to simulate and identify potential issues on-site and improve team communication. ‘Visual Construction Management’ was carried out, whereby every Friday, people would go around the site with an iPad, to monitor if everything is where it should be and the resulting data was fed into Primavera P6 Project Management software. Utilising BIM meant that Balfour Beatty have not missed any milestones during the project.

Dr. Stephen Hamil from NBS was next up with ‘The importance of the “I” in BIM’. Stephen opened with this quote from Francis Maude:

Stephen highlighted just how important it is to embrace new technology by using Kodak’s recent demise as an example. Despite having one of the first prototype digital cameras, they didn’t embrace digital early enough and following years of decline, they were removed from New York Stock Exchange earlier this year.

When you open a BIM component, more often than not they are simply nice 3D models and the only information behind the object tends to be it’s geometry. To be truly useful, a component should include information on Fire ratings, accessibility, manufacturer names and more. This Tweeted photo from CadFaster demonstrates how NBS are working with the Construction Products Association on getting the correct guidance out there so building product manufacturers know what they should be feeding into their objects.

Stephen highlighted how it is possible for product manufacturers to implement the simplest form of BIM by structuring information digitally, using COBie templates which are available from www.bimtaskgroup.org. This data can then be pulled into a parametric model, ensuring consistency of information.

Next up, with “A developer’s view”, was Martin Quinn of Great Portland Estates. Great Portland Estates are embracing BIM on new schemes, currently on the design process only, but are looking to move into construction. Martin highlighted several projects in which they’ve utilised BIM, but focused on 240 Blackfriars, which is now on-site. They appointed an independant BIM facilitator, but the architect remained as the lead coordinator. The stage E model was passed to Mace and will be handed back to Great Portland Estates upon handover of the project, for the anticipated Facilities Management model – something which Martin describes as “our Utopia”.

Last up was a case study from Darryl Store from PRP Architects. The highlighted project consisted of 181 residential units, PRP were appointed at stages E to F, although BIM was not a specific requirement. The scheme was received in CAD with lots of issues such as non-compliance with housing standards, fire strategy was questionable etc. Having been paid to go back and do a stage C re-design (although they were given no more time for this), they were able to identify service stacking issues and used cloud rendering for meeting using DWF Exchange.

The stand-out benefits of BIM for PRP are the ability to visualise potential issues and justify design decisions, auto-tracking of areas, architectural and structural coordination (including Clash detection), easier documentation of awkward junctions and construction sequencing for issue identification.

To wrap up the morning, the audience were treated to a great interactive Q&A session, with everyone having been given nifty little devices to vote on five key questions.

 

 

 

 

Question 1: Where are you on the BIM Journey?

Question 2: What is the main barrier to using BIM?

4% don’t see the benefit at all (there was a rather amusing call to these members of the audience to identify themselves and justify their answer, given all they’d heard today), The largest percentage, 34%, answered ‘lack of collaboration’, whilst 21% blamed cost, 30% blamed lack of expertise and 11% the lack of structured data.

Question 3: Who should drive the adoption of BIM?

50% of the audience voted that the Client should drive BIM adoption, followed by Architects.

Question 4: Who will drive BIM adoption?

Although 50% felt that the client should drive BIM adoption, only 4% of the audience thought they actually would. With 58% of people answering that they thought the Contractor will, in reality, drive BIM adoption. An interesting result highlighted by one audience member, who asked if the Architects in the room could identify themselves by a show of hands (there were a lot), was that although Architects came second in the ‘should’ question, they did not in the ‘will’ question – indicating that although they think they should drive BIM adoption, they won’t!

Question 5: Is designing in BIM a contradiction in terms?

An overwhelming 81% said no. However, one audience member expressed her view that simply “plugging in” components from a library will result in bland buildings with no human design thought or process. Stephen Hamil reminded us that exactly the same was once said of 2D CAD, when we moved from the Drawing Boards, but this of course never happened.

All-in-all, another great BIM event by the NBS and NLA and I look forward to next year! The hashtag for the day was #nbsbim, which I’m sure will be active for a while yet, so go and take a look. Some popular Tweets from the day: