BIMming With Enthusiasm

If you think building information modeling (BIM) is just an over-hyped fad, you haven’t been talking to people who use it. A recent report from McGraw-Hill Construction documents that architects, engineers, contractors and owners who use BIM tools are enthusiastic about them.

“BIM is quickly becoming the gold standard by which firms do work,” said Steve Jones, senior director of business development, McGraw-Hill Construction, and one of the co-authors of the “Building Information Modeling (BIM) SmartMarket Report.”

According to Jones, 62 percent of BIM users next year will use it on more than 30 percent of their project, and 45 percent of users will use it on at least 60 percent of their projects.
“It is a notable differentiator among competitors, a time-saver and a cost-reducer. BIM dramatically shifts businesses’ productivity and ROI,” he said. Companies that track value metrics are reporting returns on investment (ROI) in of 300 to 500 percent through improved project outcomes, better communication and enhanced productivity. “This is why
we are seeing such rapid growth,” Jones said.

Jones defined BIM as “the process of creating and using digital models for design, construction or operations of projects.” BIM involves digital content such as structural elements, mechanical equipment and building envelope and windows; and software tools for architectural, structural and mechanical modeling, often integrated with energy analysis, scheduling, estimating, and other vital functions.

It Counts
Ron Reim, executive vice president of Occulus, Inc., a St. Louis-based architecture firm, has been enthusiastic about BIM for years. Occulus was one of the first adopters of Revit in the Midwest, and one of the company’s first 30 customers anywhere, he said. “I accidentally stumbled into an introduction to Revit seminar at a design conference in Portland about eight years ago. It was not well attended,” he said. “They did some demos, which were pretty impressive even then, and handed out free disks. When I came back to the office and someone loaded it up, we realized it had extraordinary potential,” he said.

Occulus was doing a lot of facility work for major companies at the time, and Revit gave them a way to manage the data, as Reim explained in the following anecdote: “Anheuser-Busch called and asked if we could have a facility report in two weeks for them because they wanted to see if they could abandon all their leased office space and move everyone to their corporate campus. We spend a day trying to figure out how to get answers for them. We couldn’t with Autocad, but we found that Revit counted automatically and measured square footage automatically, so we called Anheuser-Busch back and said that we thought we had a way to do it, but not in Autocad, which is what everyone was using. In a week and a half we had space plans for most of the buildings down there, counted and measured all the furniture, and identified the linchpin: they had enough room in the buildings, but not enough parking. They figured the cost of building more parking and decided to stay put.”

That power to manage data was extraordinary. “This tool gave us the ability to move beyond drawings,” Reim said. The thought of spending time counting all the folks in two million square feet of office space was staggering, so Revit was the only way to do it,” he said.

The other advantage of Revit was that it worked more like a designer thinks, said Reim. “Designers didn’t like CAD,” he said. “We were doing drawings on paper and having interns convert them to CAD, and we always lost a lot of information in the translation. The BIM interface was more like we were taught to think in architecture school, so it let our designers leap into the digital format sooner and we captured more information earlier in the process. That’s how we moved into it.”

Clash Checking
Adam Lega, BIM coordinator at KAI Design and Build, worked for Revit when Reim and Occulus were adopting it. He said KAI also is an early adopter of BIM, and the company is now doing all of its projects with BIM.

BIM, he said, has fundamentally changed the design process at KAI. “Instead of drawing buildings by line, we construct virtual buildings,” he said. “The people who use BIM have to know how to actually put a building together. They have to know how to design. So the client is getting the best effort from start of project.”
In the old process, “the designer came up with the design and an intern translated it into construction documents,” said Lega. “With BIM the designer still comes up with the idea, and then the designer builds it virtually. In BIM, you have to think about all dimensions, so interns can’t detail it correctly.”

The biggest advantage of the new process is not the pretty pictures, he said, but rather the ability to see if there are conflicts. “The real power is the ability to do interference checking, the ability to check your pipe and duct everywhere, for example, and see if they are crossing and if you have to move one,” Lega said.
While most of the contractors that Occulus works with “are not technologically capable or attitudinally willing” to work in BIM, said Reim; Lega said that most of the contractors with whom KAI works “are driving the BIM effort within their industry.” If they do not have the capability to use BIM, KAI will give them construction documents in the form they want and also “offer to teach them how to use BIM,” Lega said.

Andrew Gayer, vice president and structural engineering principal of HOK, said the largest design firm calling St. Louis home is using BIM on all of its projects worldwideand for many of the same reasons mentioned by Reim and Lega.

“It is about useful data, about quantities of doors, about furniture placing, glare on computer monitors, etc.,” he said. HOK releases its BIM model on each project to contractors so they can get quantities out of the model for estimating purposes and use the BIM model as the basis for their construction model. “Now there is no question of how many doors are in the project. We know exactly how many and that makes estimates more accurate,” he said.
BIM also lets HOK do more upfront energy analyses, he said. “We can pull out the windows and look at reflectivity, for example, and with the push of a button we can get an energy analysis based on geography and see what happens if we change the reflectivity of the glass or if we change lights. We can give the owner a range of options and tell which option is cheaper,” he said.

As at KAI, BIM “front loads” the work at HOK, shifting more effort into schematic design and design development, Gayer said. “When you put a line on a CAD drawing, you didn’t necessarily have to know everything about that line,” he said. “Now, when you put a beam or a column or a window or a door into a BIM model, you have to know what it is, so the work flow is more forward loaded,” he said.

“The actual building is really version two and the BIM model is version one,” Gayer said. “You have to know what you are putting into version one or you will get garbage,” he said.
“It makes designing fun again,” he added. “We’re not drawing lines, we’re building a building.”

Still Working Out How to Share
What has attracted the most attention to BIM is not any of the benefits that accrue internally to a company that uses a digital model for design or construction or operations, however, but the potential benefits of sharing information among the designers, contractors, and building owner.

“The concept is that designers, constructors, and operators will all add their information to the model,” said Andrew Manuel, shareholder, Greensfelder, Hemker and Gale, PC. And that new concept brings with it a new set of potential liability issues that have to be worked out. If multiple parties are going to be sharing information that goes into a building model, and putting information into the model, they have to think up front about how they are going to do that, he said. In other words, they should agree on protocols that “are very specific about the hardware that is used, the software, the protocols for transmitting information, who is going to put information in and what type of information, etc., so that everyone has a common understanding,” he said.

Manuel said that of the various standard form construction documents available today, “ConsensusDOCS do the best job of setting up protocols.” The essential point, he said, “is to have a clear expression of what you intend to do in your contract at the beginning of the contract, including not just your scope of work but also the intended uses of the BIM model and how you are going to build the model”

Or, as Gayer phrased it, “The ability to rely on information in the BIM is very important, as is the ability to know what is in or is not in the BIM.”
Gayer added that HOK does not like any the way any of the standard form construction documents treat BIM, not AIA, AGC, or ConsensusDOCS; so HOK is developing its own documents.

“The AIA says design documents just express the intent of the design. We are now saying that our BIM document is good enough to build by,” he said.

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