Posts Tagged IPD

Global BIM in Abu Dhabi : Solving the same problems

Reading a recent article in Construction Week I found it remarkable, but perhaps not surprising that the construction industry there is using the same analogies and facing the same issues we here in the US.  Within a week Gerhard Hope of Construction Week posted two articles one titled, ‘MEP Contractors Still Wary of BIM‘ and ‘Design, Build, and Maintain‘ which promotes the use of BIM to solve construction, regulatory and maintenance issues.  The jist of the first article is that the MEP contractors were giving up on BIM because generally it’s a lot of work.  However, there were some great quotes.

It means you do all the thinking and engineering before anyone starts building the structure or installing services. It has the big advantage of being able to plan ahead, and not find a major issue on the third floor, for example, that is going to stop work for a couple of months while somebody works out what to do.

One of the things about construction is that it is really a team activity, involving thousands of people on infrastructure projects, for example. A major change that has come about is the need for all professionals to work much closer together. I think BIM is certainly one of the ways that this can happen. We embraced BIM several years ago, in fact, on the Dubai Metro project, and we carried that forward on our metro work in Makkah and Calcutta, using the same methodology.

David Crowder  – Atkins MEP Head of Department – Middle East and India

If you have a fast-track project with a lot of problems to fix, ultimately it all comes back to the quality of the documentation you started out with…BIM is a major advantage to the main contractor, because they are not fiddling around hacking out the structure, or changing the finishes, or lowering ceilings – all the things we know and love in the construction industry. Instead we generate all the drawings fully coordinated in the BIM environment

Steven Anderson – Atkins: Design Systems Manager – Middle East and India

Companies who are able to respond positively to these changes are the ones who are going to survive through these difficult times, as opposed to the dinosaurs, those companies which can only operate in a traditional business model. This will lead to a healthier marketplace and an industry as a whole.

Kevin Mitchell – Buro Happold : Director

And with Abu Dhabi still on the scene it was reported that Tekla ‘Shapes Abu Dhabi’s Pairs Sorbonne University‘ Also Tekla and Autodesk had announced last month a ‘collaboration to enable better BIM workflow‘  This announcement though sounds like two kids in the principals office who agree not to fight on the playground anymore.  Obviously Autodesk want people to use Revit Structure, and anecdotally I hear most people say they use Tekla when going from design to fabrication, so what that collaboration will look like is anyone’ s guess, but the market must have been calling for something but what it’s mostly calling for is integration.

People are frustrated.  Frustrated that construction seems inefficient.  With Technology that does not talk to each other.  With doing the same thing 15 times because of the myriad of design / documentation packages out there do not talk to each other.  That more problems are not figured out digitally instead of physically in the field where it costs infinitely more.  The people want to use the best tool for the job and have that data act freely and unencumbered with other tools.  However, with BIM (Building Information Models) we are a lot closer then we used to be and its a global phenomena.

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Skanska Pre Fab at Miami Valley Hospital saves $1.5 to $3 million & months on the job : BIM

A couple of things of many that jumped out at me watching this video. “Something that might take someone 2 weeks took me 3 days.”, “less scrap”, “better air quality”, and the winner “we’re 6 months early”. Not only that they estimated that it took 1-2% off a $152 million building, that’s $1.5 to $3.0 million, one project, and that’s only on the prefab, what else can BIM/IPD/VDC do for you.

An inadvertent meeting of the minds during planning for a 484,000-sq-ft hospital in Dayton, Ohio, turned into an effort that has propelled multitrade prefabrication of hospital components to a new level. In the most ambitious U.S. implementation of the strategy, the construction manager estimates that prefabbing the 178 identical patient rooms and 120 overhead corridor utility racks sliced more than two months from construction and 1% to 2% off the cost of the $152-million building, which is 90% complete.

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Disney BIM : 2D, 3D, 4D, 5D, 6D, More. Jack Blitch from Disney presents BIM at NASA Info Tech Summit

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.


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Balkanized BIM: IPD -> VDC -> HPBMS -> Lean -> LPDS

What the… It’s like alphabet soup and it’s also like the wild west out there, everyone staking their claim, evangelizing, growing their camps…but what’s it really mean.  To me, and I’m lucky as we provide mostly the BM,  not a very attractive acronym I realize as soon as I type it, but we provide the building model and then there is a whole lot of work to fill in the ‘I’ (Information) but what my position does afford me is to see how people are using these tools, how they understand them and what they hope to accomplish, but first lets decipher the soup and to me they break down into the majors (concepts) and the minors (processes).

Majors

BIM – Building Information Model.

VDC – Virtual Design and Construction

IPD – Integrated Project Delivery

Lean / Lean Construction

Minors

HPBMS – High Performance Building Management Systems

LPDS – Lean Production Delivery System (not sure I should have added this one but it came out Lean Construction Institute) and, well it fit well into the schema.

Well, what’s the point?  I will go back to quoting a GC we worked for, who was one of the first to ask us for a Revit model of an existing building.  ‘We now have the time and inclination to do things right’  This was as the real estate bubble was bursting, bids were more competitive and clients asking for hard bids.  Loans had dried up. The old ways of doing things just did not seem to work or feel right and the lowest hanging fruit was putting together a building digitally, go over design options, costs, maintenance costs of those options going forward, operating costs for your choices, choosing, unearthing design problems digitally before a shovel hits the round, minimize change orders, get a building up quicker, for less money, and of equal or better quality with a firm assurance of what that building might cost you to run in the future, as the total life cycle costs of the building end up dwarfing the costs to build it.

So put any wrapper around it you want but it is about building digitally, communicating with your peers, subs, and anyone else who has a stake in it and getting it done.  The playbook?  Well that’s where we see all the acronyms come in and consultants forming and practices starting to help guide firms through this. My experience has been that GCs were the first to really adopt this, and the good ones have been through it, at least from the construction end, but there is a lot more learn, streamline and go through before there will be anything close to best practices (digitally) across all disciplines so I hope you like soup…But in the end, it’s like grandma says, ‘it’s good for you.’

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BIM Projects Coming in 10% Lower –> IPD 20% Lower

A recent post by Dennis Neeley on Reed Construction Data states that recent reports show projects coming in at 10% for building drafted in a BIM format, and 20% lower for those using IPD and integrating the disciplines digitally.  However, Dennis goes on later on in the article to note, and rightly so, that operating costs of a building during its lifetime start to dwarf the construction costs.  And that correct data about existing facilities and the better management of those assets can show savings from 20% to 40%.  However, still one of the biggest issues, and one I touch on frequently,  is interoperability, the development of standards and standardized objects.  I also think there is an opportunity for manufacturers who provide excellent objects to designers can start see quicker adoption of there products and decreased sales cycles as consumers of those digital objects are already educated about the product and using them in their models.

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AEC Edge Premiers: Industry Mag from AUGI – Focus on Revit

AEC Edge just premiered from AUGI. (Autodesk Users Group Intl.)  It’s inital focus is to provideAutodesk users crucial information to “be more productive and on top of their game.”  First issue seems to deal with all things Revit.  3D and IPD, and Revit in High School, which seems interesting that these deign/collobration tools are starting to far down the education pipeline.  The format is of electronic magazine, where you flip pages which seems fine from a user consumption model, but web share model, and maybe it’s me, but does not seem as user friendly as it could be.  For example, if I wanted to post a link to the article I just read, it is not readily apparent on how to do so, which seems counter intuitive in web dissmenation of content.  Either way worth the read for those in the INdustry.  And for AUGI, this is a crucial site and source for anyone, anybeing in the Autodesk Universe.  They have provided, at least to me, more answers and information than any other site out there.

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