By Steve Rizer
In striving toward successful “BIM (building information modeling) implementation,” when aligning the technology with business goals, “your first requirement is to define what your expertise is so that you know who you can work with.” This is one of the pieces of advice that buildingSMART alliance Executive Director Deke Smith offered to professionals attending WPL Publishing’s “Implementing BIM -- A Strategic Approach” webinar, a recording of which recently was added to the ConstructionPro Network (ConstructionProNet.com) Download Library free of charge for members.
“We’re seeing in the industry … that some contractors are now partnering with A&E [architecture and engineering] firms or, in some cases, even hiring people into their own firms to do work to be able to produce the products that they can use during construction because they’re saying, ‘Okay, it doesn’t make any sense to regenerate the model for construction after you get it from the designer.’ So, the designers who aren’t teaming up and providing models that the contractors are going to use are probably going to be in a little bit of a hurt….”
Smith urged attendees to examine technologies that “are going to be able to support all of the folks who are involved” in the project. He stressed the importance of using open standards “so that everybody can use those products, and that’s really the strategy that’s going to be required because there’s no one vendor that covers that whole lifecycle” of a facility.
These and other actions to implement BIM successfully can pay off, Smith said, reporting that the use of BIM, in some cases, has yielded a 12:1 return on investment. “I know Holder Construction Co. … looked over about 20 different projects, and they identified that they were getting between a 5:1 and 12:1 return on investment….”
Smith and co-presenter Michael Tardif, senior partner at BLCI Group LLC, also discussed “the real value of BIM -- structured information versus geometry;” managing culture change; how the “trust factor” really works; avoiding mistakes from the computer-aided-design era; developing data-exchange capabilities; assessing team capabilities; managing expectations; and other areas.
For immediate access to the complete webinar (full audio and visual) -- as well as three dozen other construction-related webinars that are available for download -- sign up to become a member of WPL Publishing’s ConstructionPro Network, a complete training, education, and development resource for the construction industry, at http://constructionpronet.com/info/Charter2012.aspx.
