Archive for category BIM
IT Spending down at Design Firms except for BIM
Posted by Jim Foster in BIM, Revit on June 12, 2009
Recently posted by Jeff Yoders and available at Zweigwhite form their 2009 Industry Survey it stated that while most design firms are cutting their budgest an IT investments, upto 65% will be increasing their use of BIM in 2009. Autodesk had the lion’sshare of CAD users with 81% penetration and Revit leads BIm with 61%.
Revit Rumble
Posted by Jim Foster in BIM, Revit on June 12, 2009
As a preface to this article, I wanted to say that the employees that came through my business and went to architecture firms to become designers are still gainfully employed despite the multiple haircuts sic. layoffs the industry has gone through. I can attribute that to my acute acumen and hiring skills, although I always believed these individulas were exceptional. Or we can look at the skills they needed in our environment which was always to build, draft and think in 3D, so they both came out of our shop with refined Revit skills which I think is becoming one of the most important skills on your resume, or at least a skill that anyone in the profession is developing.
The AIA in Portland, Ore has put together a Revit Rumble for both employed and unemployed designers to show their chops.
Labor Productivity Declines in the Construction Industry: Causes and Remedies
Posted by Jim Foster in BIM on June 10, 2009
This is an article by Paul Teicholz from Stanford it’s older but still very relevant today. If you don’t intend to make the jump the nut of it is the lack of collaborative tools within the construction industry is inhibiting productivity gains. Even as better tools and methods appear their adoption is slow and buildings are becoming more complex.
Typically, as informally described by PMs in the field, after the steel goes up or there’s a major renovation HVAC, plumbing, electrical, etc. want to be in first, why? Less problems and issues downstream, no worries if your stuff is colliding with anyone elses and minimum change orders. Compare that to the last one in, who’s chases are now filled with other equipment, who’s runs are compromised by a plumbing stack or HVAC trunk. I’d want to be first one in too.
One of my friends, and clients has a design/build firm. He was a trained architect but got more into the building side. He brought us into document the existing conditions of a residence. We brought it into Revit and he then he sat down with someone from my team to design the proposed. We phased it, rendered it, he used it for a variance hearing, etc.
Now the plans needs a stamp. The architect does not work in 3D so need to export everything into 2D, not a problem since the architect does not work within the Autodesk family of products, I am not trying to be a shill for Autodesk I am just showing the problems going cross platform, so he is going to use our stuff to trace over. We export the floorplans, sections and elevations. He goes to work. Now the landscape architect still works with pencil and paper. Even though we had a plot plan and brought it into Revit so all the grades and current information is in the model, the landscape architect went back out with a transit and paper and created his own plan on paper.
What is the number one cause of inefficiency due to interoperability. “The manual re-entering of data.” This was reported in the 2007 Smart Market Report from McGraw Hill. They also cite :
• Time using duplicate software
• Document version checking
• RFI processing
• Cost of data translations
and it is not difficult to see the time sink this becomes.
Now take the other end of the spectrum. We sat in an IFMA round table at MGH (Mass General Hospital) where they told us they used BIM and IPD (Integrated Proejct Delivery) and they did everything digitally. Scheduled it, collision detection, etc. and they found tens of thousands of collisions on the computer before anyone went into the field. I have seen estimates, and I will try and dig up the source for you, that each collision was valued between $3,000 to $5,000. That should provide enough of an answer as why anyone should switch to BIM. And I keep coming back to what one of the construction mangers said to me, “we now have the time and inclination to things right.”
Sustainable Buildings By Design
Posted by Jim Foster in BIM, Built Environment, Point to Point Laser Technology on June 2, 2009
The AARA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) is now law and now the federal dollars are starting to spill into the economy. The effect on BIM and its growth can be shown by the GSA solicitation. Autodesk has been delivering 2 page white papers, one of which is Sustainable Buildings By Design. While they mention 2 ways to get the built environment, tracing and laser scanning, they have failed to see the new technolgies and methods that will be chasing this new market.
Wetting your whistle
Posted by Jim Foster in BIM on June 1, 2009
Construction Week Online, had this little article about BIM, which mostly just pushes you to read the BIM Journal, which is a great idea all around.
Huge BIM Solicitation by the GSA
Posted by Jim Foster in BIM on May 31, 2009
The GSA (Government Services Association) perhaps the biggest landlord in the world recently released 2 solicitations for BIM creation of existing properties and Laser Scanning. 5 years, $10 million per year.
So while there may be a lack of tools in capturing the built environment there is a building demand for these types of services. And with GSA on board this is akin to McDonald’s asking that all their chicken be fed corn and named ‘Albert’, which is to say a lot of companies will be getting on board to offer these types of services, which will help differentiate them, which will force everyone to catch up, which will shift the target of services to BIM.
FMJ Article: BIM How It Has Changed FM
Posted by Jim Foster in BIM, Built Environment on May 28, 2009
Methods to Capture the Built Environment
Posted by Jim Foster in BIM, Built Environment, Laser BIM, Point to Point Laser Technology on May 28, 2009
It is estimated that the world wide construction industry is $4.6 trillion dollars, over $1 trillion in the US alone. However, upto 80% of that construction is performed in the built environment. Adaptive reuse, tenant improvements, renovations and the like dominate especially in older cities and especially in Europe. The big question is how to take advantage of all the benefits of BIM in the built environment. There are different technologies at use that I believe are more complimentary than competitive.
Graph Paper and Pencil
Graph paper and pencil is still the most used technology today. Why? There is little or no technology to learn much like going out for a run where all you have to do is put on your sneakers and head out the door. The problem is it is time intensive. The process involves drawing the building and then placing measurements on each architectural feature. When thatis completed you have to translate all of that onto a CAD workstation. Inevitably there are missed measurements and the surveyor/drafter will need to revisit the site, or make an educated guess at what is happening inside the building making it time intensive or error prone. More often than not these as-builts get a VIF (Verify In Field) stamp which then puts the onus on the construction manager to get it right in the field causing work delays as they repeat work that has already been done.
Point to Point Laser Technology (PPLT)
This technology translates laser range finder data directly into a CAD or BIM enabled work stations. This allows the user to build models or capture a building geometry in real time while in the field. By building in real time the user knows if the building is being captured correctly. With real time feedback they know if a room is dimensioned correctly simply by looking at the model, and an incorrectly drawn room will not close. The relationships between rooms are captured and the envelope of the building is determined and drawing on site. Additionally, the user walks out of a building with a model that is close to complete needing much less post processing than other methods.
Laser Scanning
Equipment exists today that will scan buildings creating a dimensionally correct point cloud of a building. Users can query the model to develop features and their relationships. While we dream of the day when these scans can be converted instantaneously into a BIM model the reality today is that intensive post processing is needed to turn them into a model than can be used inside a BIM package. After collecting the data the operator needs to take cross sections of the building in multiple views to bring into a BIM program. They use these sections as backgrounds to build a model so a lot fo tracing needs to be done, inserting another user intensive process into BIM creation. Uses for this technology can be excellent where data collection is difficult or MEP intensive projects. There is excellent case studies (I will find them later and post them) where when using this technology to capture an MEP intensive project like an oil rig retrofit minimized or even eliminated reworking on the site. That all the piping and equipment was designed and engineered off site and fit perfectly. The ROI can be immense when you imagine a full construction crew on site, and the as-builts pay for themselves, many times over.
The Right Tool for the Job
When starting a job a surveyor, architect, engineer, etc. must decide what technology to use based on the job. Many times what is needed is the correct geometry of the building is needed, in this case, PPLT might be best employed other cases laser scanning is needed and in smaller jobs even graph paper and pencil might be best employed. Most importantly is to create dimensionally correct data so everyone working downstream can work more effectively and problems or any other issues are solved digitally rather than on site.
Why the movement to BIM
Posted by Jim Foster in BIM on May 27, 2009
To quote one of the construction managers we do work for, ‘we now have the time and inclination to do things right.’ What he was referring to is the use of BIM (Building Information Models) in all phases of construction. What is this stuff? It’s a way of not only looking at building in 3D but designing, building and managing in it in 3D.
Previously, everyone worked on paper with pencil. This was better than a stick on dirt as it communicated what people needed and what their intentions were. With the advent of CAD (Computer Aided Drafting) designers, builders, developers used digital documentation methods but it was essentially still drawing albeit with a much faster and more collaborative tool. When the world of 3D came many people had the reaction…well to sum it up I’ll use what a designer said to me at one of our presentations or dog and pony shows, ‘we don’t want any z-axis information.’ It was a new way of doing things, and in the era of free money or easy credit no had the time or inclination to do things differently as you always have to take productivity hit when learning how to do new things. However, now with the most recent implosion of the real estate and financial markets professionals are looking deeper on how to repair margins, work faster, and work better, hence…BIM.
BIM tools and platforms allow users to communicate and desgin visually. So that’s cool but why should we spend a lot of money for it? I’ll give you an example, at an association meeting sponsored by MGH they said they found over 30,000 collisions digitally. That’s when a proposed pipe, or plumbing stack ‘collides’ with an HVAC vent or similar type of interference. There are estimates of $3,000 to $5,000 per collision. These are real world problems have construction people figuring out and addressing problems on site is tremendously expensive. Figuring these problems out digitally, not so much.
To view the McGraw HIll 2008 BIM report go here ( http://construction.ecnext.com/mcgraw_hill/includes/BIM2008.pdf )
So this BIM stuff sounds great, now what. Where there are competing technologies out there of course. Companies like Autodesk, Bentley, and Nemetschek have their own platforms and engines to work with, but there is more than lip service being paid to an emerging open standard called IFC-XML, that stands for Industry Foundation Classes. The dream is to have a transportable model across platforms so it should not matter which you are using. Think of the BIM model as a web page, and it should not matter what browser you are using, or better the BIM is the operating system.
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