On the eve of a BIM revolution

The proponents of Building Information Modeling claim a revolution is coming to the Polish construction industry by Alex Hayes Imagine you are responsible for maintaining a building and you need to hunt down a faulty electrical installation. After a day in the cellar, looking through incomplete documentation that was stored only as an alternative to being thrown away, a miracle occurs and you find something: a scrap of paper that states (probably in pencil) where this installation should be. With flashlight in hand, you make your way to yet another forgotten recess of the building only to be confronted with a sewage pipe. Obviously, due to some oversight, there must have been a clash during the design process and the general contractor, on discovering that he was to install a pipe in the same place, must have decided to find somewhere else to place your elusive faulty wiring. God alone knows where it might be now since the general contractor will have had forgotten it long ago. Theoretically, with BIM such a nightmare scenario should never occur. [caption id="attachment_66498" align="alignleft" width="260"] Image : shutterstock [/caption] More than just a concept But what is BIM? The acronym itself stands for Building Information Modeling. David Philp, the head of BIM at consultancy Mace claims that: “BIM has many definitions but essentially it is about the creation and management of digital data in our built environment, it allows the virtual production, analysis, evaluation and optimal development of an asset in a digital environment that mimics the understanding and behavior of the solution to the realization of that solution in reality.” The basic concept seems simple: All the information regarding a building or structure is held digitally and can be made fully accessible to interested parties over the internet. Even during the very earliest design stages when building to BIM specifications, all the details of a future construction are held in a central database in the form of a three-dimensional digital model. In fact, this data model will slowly grow ever more elaborate as different parties collaborate on its development until the model becomes the actual design itself. At the beginning, the building might be no more than an amorphous block. An architect might then add windows. The placement of these windows can instantly be seen by every party involved, including for example the investor or maybe even the general contractor. Later on, someone other than the original architect might specify what kind of frames these windows will have. Even minutiae such as the exact make of electrical socket might eventually be specified by a subcontractor, who just happens to know that this is the type of fitting he has stored away in stock. The model will go down to the finest possible detail so the exact number of screws and rivets required should be known. Design clashes should be minimized because everyone is working on the same centralized data and problems will become apparent in the model and not on the site. But BIM goes beyond just the design stage. It also includes modeling the construction process itself. Before any work starts on the site, it will already be known how long each stage of the construction should take; what work must be completed before the next phase begins and even what materials need to be delivered to the site and when. In effect, the structure is first built in the virtual world, again, eliminating problems before they manifest themselves in the real world. If somehow some kind of clash still does occur and a contractor is forced to come up with his own creative solutions, the changes that he makes are added to the central design. BIM can even be used by property managers since it will also model the costs and energy usage of a building over its lifetime. In effect, with a BIM building everything that can be known is known and these data are easily accessible. [negative]"In many other industries simulation is not new, it's been around for a long time.[/negative] Raising the standard “For me, it’s obvious in the long term that it will become industry standard,” insisted Jonathan Cohen the director of building consultancy for Eastern Europe at Colliers International. He pointed out that, “In Western markets it’s already becoming industry standard and in Central Europe we are generally a little bit behind in terms of this type of innovation, as has been the case with green certification.” He’s not the only one who believes that BIM will soon be adopted universally. “What you’ve got to realize,” said Iain Leyden the country manager for Poland at Turner & Townsend, “is that in many other industries simulation is not new, it’s been around for a long time. In the car industry, in the aeronautical industry they work on the basis of designing cars or planes through modeling them and simulating them before they actually get into the factory production stage, so it’s not a new thing. It’s a new process for the construction industry, but BIM models associate additional information about asset components with geometry in a structured way. This lets us build project documentation that enables buildings and other assets to be constructed, used and maintained efficiently.” [caption id="attachment_66499" align="alignright" width="353"] Image : shutterstock [/caption] For Jonathan Cohen, “having all project information easily accessible is just common sense.” He enthused, “At the moment when you look at a lot of buildings, when they get built, the documents are incomplete, then they get adapted and the documents for that are incomplete and then some people do other things in the building and there are no documents at all. People maintain the buildings and don’t keep complete documentation, people move the documentation, it gets lost and 15 years after the building has been built, you go and look at it and the documentation bears little or no resemblance to the actual state of affairs. Having a system where you’ve got everything in a very managed, ordered format in one file which allows you to see everything electronically and allows other people in other countries to look at the same information that you’re looking at obviously just makes complete sense.” That sort of product is already available in Poland, but developers are not generally prepared to pay extra for it and as the majority of designers do not use BIM platforms as standard, it produces an extra cost. “The reality is that in the long term, if your product isn’t equipped with this and all of the other products that are being brought to market do have it, then your product is going to be considered inferior, as is now the case with uncertified green buildings,” Cohen said. A collaborative approach Despite his enthusiasm, there are very few that have adopted this approach in Poland. Jonathan Cohen knows of only a few tenants that have insisted on BIM for their fit-outs. Recently, at a conference at the British Embassy in Warsaw representatives from the General Directorate for National Roads and Highways GDDKiA and Polish State Railways PKP saw a presentation of how BIM is being used to model a bypass around Stockholm in Sweden, which includes many kilometers of tunnels. In Iain Leyden’s opinion those representatives were concerned more with the immediate cost of implementation and whether Polish professionals have the skill set to implement it instead of whether the BIM process would benefit their projects. He claimed that Polish construction professionals already have the necessary skills and that the costs can be quickly recouped. “If it costs one to design it, ten to build it and one hundred to operate it, over the life cycle of the asset, you may expect 10-20 percent reduction of construction costs and 10-20 percent in the operational costs. That’s huge compared to the cost of implementing a BIM process. The point is that Polish architects and engineers are already working with technologies that model geometry, however, BIM-enabled working allows this information to be shared by different project participants and also between different stages of design, construction and operation to allow other parameters to be modeled such as cost, construction process, time schedule, operational maintenance. Clients would benefit from an improved understanding of design, reduced costs, less re-working, optimized delivery time and reuse of the information for maintenance and alterations,” he explained. Robert Handzel of MCKB has also emphasized the value of this collaborative approach. “It’s not only the designer that can make use of the data model, but also the general contractor and later on the property manager. BIM eliminates a number of painful current problems such as a lack of coordination and the successive reduction of time for a building venture including the design phase, the valuation, the schedule analysis and the analysis of the work progress. The design and construction work can as a result become cheaper.” He also believes that BIM reduces misunderstandings between the different parties involved in the construction of a BIM building. “The greatest benefits result from the immediate access to information, which is valuable at every stage of a construction investment. For example, it makes it easier to come to an agreement with the investor with regard to the building and it is easier for the investor to understand designers when the understanding is based on a three-dimensional graphic instead of flat documents.” All the experts seem convinced that BIM is the future of the construction industry. And there is also clear official support within Europe because in January of this year an EU directive was passed that stated that governments can, if they so choose, make BIM a mandatory requirement for all public tenders from 2016. Despite all this, it still seems strange that few people have heard of this innovation in Poland.