Jack Blitch, VP Disney Imagineering, presented at Day 2 of the NASA Information Technology Summit on August 17 and discussed BIM and IPD. His comments really start at 1:06 mark and move forward from there. What I find interesting and really reiterates the process of BIM, call it IPD, call it smart, but bringing in the sub-contractors early to reduce rework and make sure the designers are creating anything that can’t be built or is too expensive. I brought in some of the transcript below.
We bring in subcontractors early to help with design instead of our designers designing something maybe we can’t afford or doesn’t make sense. We have the guys that are building it sitting at the design table with us…we want to reduce rework, use it as a constructability tool…determine clashes early so we don’t (find) them out on sight. Reduce personnel. Reduce shop drawings… So the shop drawings come right out of the model so the vendors/sub contractors don’t have to redesign. – Jack Blitch, NASA Summit
In case the video is not coming up you can go directly to http://tiny.cc/nasabimdisney , as either the CSPAN embed, or WordPress is not dealing well.
Stitch Kingdom also covered the summit and summarized Blitch’s comments and I’ve included some of them here.
Using the Fantasyland Expansion as the primary example, Blitch demonstrates how Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) users computers to generate ‘6-D models’ to engineer a project before the construction beings, a concept pioneered by Disney in an effort to reduce costs and speed construction by avoiding potential problems on-site. Disney began using BIM-IPD on Soarin’ and — as an example — Blitch stated that had Expedition Everest been engineered using traditional methods, it would consist of approximately 20,000 construction documents.
Using The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure as an example of the BIM-IPD process, Blitch demonstrates how 3D modeling has evolved into 4D modeling in which the computerized model can actually project the construction over time which the Imagineers then use as a guideline for the attraction’s construction. Blitch adds a 5th and 6th dimension to the project development which covers cost as well as the capability of exporting various components of an attraction’s construction to its respective contractor/partner.
