In 2011, David Frise from the United Kingdom and Dennis Knight from the United States of America, presented on Building Information Modelling (BIM), standards of the time and the value BIM brings to a project.
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All right so I’ll get started I want to first uh thank you uh personally and on behalf of uh the ashr B steering committee for having me present to sibsy uh this evening uh and uh my goal tonight is to kind of talk about building information
Modeling um go through and I’m going to talk to you about it from a small to midsize architectural architectural engineering firm that has spent about six years now learning the demm authoring tools integrating it into our practice and uh slowly bringing our Consultants on board and now uh seeing
More and more involvement on the contractor side as David mentioned uh earlier so with that I’ll get started um oops let’s see think I actually started with the last slide instead of the first okay so some of the learning objectives uh this evening is to uh Define them and
I’m going to use an industry standard definition here in a few minutes talk about some of the values uh that we have seen in our practice with Bim and then some uh maybe some of that you may consider Flyn flam a little bit of high
In the sky but not much most of what I’m going to talk about is things that we are doing or Architects or contractors around at least the southeastern United States are able to do right now uh give you a couple of resources if you’re just in the early stages of talking about
Adopting B that you might want to use and then some of the things that we’re using B for it may create new opportunities new markets for Architects Consulting Engineers contractors uh detailers um to start out with and and during the uh the ashray Bim steering committee we talked about a lot of
Definitions and the one I think we finally settled on and put into the ashray guide was the one from the national B standard the building smart Alliance uh it’s the most succinct and concise and basically what it says is that a Bim is a digital representation of both the physical and functional characteristics
Of a facility um that being the case the Bim is to be a shared knowledge resource about the facility forming a reliable basis for decision making throughout the life cycle of a facility or building and that’s defined as existing from its earliest conception uh right through demolition
Or in the case of sustainability in the way buildings should be built through their adaptive reuse um next step in that that uh we’re working within ashray is creating a data dictionary uh that translates a lot of our standards and a lot of the energy codes and indoor air quality and
Ventilation standards into a digital readable language that can be understood and interpreted between say a physical model and an analytical model that we’ll talk about a little bit more as we move into the presentation now why do we need this uh we all know these statistics pretty well
Now that that buildings consume about 40% of the energy 70% of electricity that’s generated at least here in the United un States and that we’re running out of our natural uh nonrenewable uh fuel bases um and we have poor indoor air quality Rising health care costs so
It’s uh at least my belief that uh the hbac industry is is poised to help solve a lot of those problems by improving the efficiency of buildings the indoor air quality in buildings and uh that in turn opens up tremendous opportunities for our young engineers and those entering the fields
Today I think I think we have a good future uh in this business and I tend to be a glass half full person anyway um so uh add to those statistics that that that 70% energy about 50% of it is consumed by the air conditioning systems so uh whether you’re the owner
The engineer the contractor optimizing those hbac systems and keeping them uh working at Optimum capacity and Optimum efficiency is going to become more and more important uh from a health safety security and indoor environmental standpoint and just from a cost standpoint uh again as fuel prices begin
To soar and U cost us more money uh be own us on keeping uh hbac systems working the way they were intended will become more and more important so where are we at um about six years ago our firm decided that we’re going to move away from this two-dimensional project delivery process
And so we we are at a Crossroads of going from two-dimensional delivery to a three-dimensional working environment we’re still delivering two-dimensional black and white drawings to contractors for bidding purposes for contractual uh obligations and those things uh we are not at the point of delivering that 3D model to a contractor
At least on most of the work that we work on uh but we do 100% of our work within the office now in this 3D environment we uh we only have one one or two U Federal agency clients that still require a 2d electronic deliverable uh so we we actually work in
3D throughout the design process and then convert those documents to 2D for delivery at all right so to do that and move into a 3D virtual work environment we need tools that are capable of analyzing a building under almost any expected or unexpected condition condition um not be it from a
Uh analytical basis from energy or daylighting to a security Bridge uh to uh to just a natural disaster uh to optimize our buildings and and and continually get more out of a building for less money we’ve got to have some integrated and Inter interoperable tools and I think that’s where building
Information modeling will be the essential tool that will ensure that we we’re able to do that meet those challenges head on um in fact some of you have probably heard Gordon holness our past president say that he believes that that b will not only change the way
We design and construct and operate our buildings but that it is going to change the very way we work live and interact with our buildings and uh I believe that as well I mean with our smartphones and smart technology and and Tablet PCs and Integrated Security Systems uh that that
The future of B is we’re just now scratching the surface one thing I I do want to mention though and and and we’ve actually learned that here uh in in our office is that that b is a tool uh and it’s a tool that that you need to apply just like
Any other Tool uh it’s not 3D C uh the objects within the the system are smart and that’s if you’re going to adopt them that’s that’s the intelligence of them that you want to capitalize on to create efficiencies the other thing is it’s not going to fix a
Silo thinking process if you are not in the mode of of of working in an integrated fashion and bringing your consultants in early and uh right now starting to see more and more design building the area getting the contractors on board uh very early uh and and working Within These systems
Either with their own B systems or working with the designers within B to do very early coordination um it’s just not a substitute for that good management practice um then by itself is not going to fix any of those fragmentation or u n integrated project delivery or lean construction practices at
All so um many of you probably have seen this curve it’s it’s more got to do with an integrated project delivery process than than necessarily B again applying them as a tool and capturing that data can eliminate a lot of the things you saw on that last slide uh but
Essentially for anyone who hasn’t seen this uh graphic I think it sums up construction business pretty well in one slide uh the green line is uh represents our ability to impact cost of a project from design throughout construction and operation and pretty much uh from the standpoint of making those early
Decisions the green line you can see our ability to impact that cost diminishes as we move further and further out on the project timeline uh this red line here uh is the cost of changes and of course the the further we get where we we get here into construction and we’re not working
Within our virtual environments or on paper and begin putting up bricks and mortar the more and more expensive changes become uh our traditional methods of actually designing and construct constructing have uh for the most part followed this third line the white line here uh where we do a little bit of
Design uh get a sign off by an owner um get further into the design with more and more details right here find out the Project’s over budget as soon as it’s bid in almost 100% of the case is under a traditional method we value engineer
The job and uh go from there um the key to an integrated design process and capture of of data that everyone in the process can use early on is trying to follow this blue curve here where our decision making processes that might impact the cost and and coordinate the
Project happens well before we ever bid this job and move way out here on the red line uh so who’s going to drive this train I think um I I looked through some of the uh the earlier siy programs that’s been on Ben and I saw some discussions about the government uh
Making some mandates and things like that what we’re seeing here uh is a combination of Architects and owners uh driving the adoption of them a little faster than say um a Consulting engineer or designer engineer um a lot of the larger our health care clients that do uh do larger
Hospitals are beginning to request that we do it in them and do our coordination and in most cases uh there’s a contractor brought on board early there too um surprisingly we’ve got a good many contractors and subcontractors uh who are adopting them faster than say the mechanical and electrical sub Consultants that that
Designed the systems uh we have a contractor up just a couple hundred miles north of here U Rogers that that does not do any of their work that’s not coordinated through b anymore even if they receive 2D documents from an AE they uh they inhouse have Architects mechanical electrical
Employment Engineers that then recreate all that work into a Bim and do their coordination and planning before they ever um begin construction um one of the biggest things we saw early on because when we adopted a bit authoring tool about six years ago we didn’t have any Consultants
That were using it and no no contractors um but we did see a a a marked improvement even in that first year of adopting The Tool uh in our productivity uh and I would estimate based on looking at our numbers that we picked up about 15% better production purely through better visualization and
Being able to understand the building better um now that has diminished some now because as we have become better at visualizing and and better at making decisions sooner I I think some of our designers tend to play with the job a little bit longer so I I’ve begun seeing
Utilization or chargeability rates drop a little over that six-year period And I think it’s because it does allow us to uh tend to uh work on the job a little bit longer um and and consider more options than we used to um the other thing um is that that um the clients and
Community that we’ve been able to take our projects to uh some of the biggest uh compliments we’ve got from uh school boards and and County councils and some of our Municipal work and those kind of things is that they understand the building and the building ends up
Looking the way we showed them so uh quite often uh people in the non-construction trades have a very difficult time uh visualizing ing what a building might look like from a two-dimensional perspective here in Charleston we have a very strong historic preservation um uh organization we have over 3,000
Historic buildings uh in in Charleston and so our boards of architectural view tend to require physical models of most anything that’s going to be built uh using uh B and our B authoring tools they have begun to allow us to substitute some 3D uh renderings that they normally would not accept if they
Were hand generated renderings uh versus the way we’re able to show multiple views of a a building in three dimensions now um one of the biggest things that that I think Bim offers us right now now uh is is the ability to do better coordination and that again requires an integrated
Process with almost all of the team involved in the B uh so many of our areas are ultimately exposed during the construction phase and and that’s a costly phase again if you remember the red curve on the McLean graphic um and then others can go for years uh without
Being detected are becoming imp parent and uh if any of you uh still do like like I do I do a lot of the quality control in the office the the manual con uh phase of coordination like on the left uh flipping back and forth between uh multiple disciplines um is still a
Difficult way to check a set of drawings and and even after that’s done I think i’ I’ve seen a statistic where um we still have somewhere between three to five errors and omissions on every sheet even after it’s been well coordinated manually a lot of that can be solved uh
Purely through some interference checking with within a them uh again as long as you’ve got whole team on board uh something that’s that’s starting to take hold and and then a pilot uh phase is is some enhanced ability to demonstrate Code Compliance again Charlotte North Carolina has has been piloting the
Project to uh do an automated uh code compliance check for the international energy conservation code where you can upload a Bim to the uh building officials website uh run a model code Checker and uh receive a report on your building code uh your energy code compliance from what
Understand the state Wisconsin is also piloting that that same program that comes out of the International Code Council um another good advantage to aim um and I think uh a a member of Cy told me this that you all had commissioned a study uh back at one of uh last Summer’s
Ashray meeting that we tend to uh transfer data between ourselves during design and construction seven times and usually all seven of those times is in some different shape or form or format um by having the data inside this Bim uh we’re able to make some better budgeting and purchase management
Decisions and uh uh quantity takeoffs are are quite uh accurate and and and very doable at this stage uh of them develop a lot of the B authoring tools all of them have the ability to extract quantities and a good many of the cost estimating programs are able to take
Those quantities and plug those into a budget or cost estimate same goes for schedules um schedules can be more accurate uh as the the objects within a b are assigned either successor or predecessor uh activities and uh again just like the takeoffs when the takeoffs are more
Accurate uh and more well defined uh you have the ability toh take a lot of the guesswork out of what has to be done uh to uh build that building so um some fairly simple tools that that are available to kind of help build a building or virtually
Construct it without having to go out and actually put the shovels in the ground and start moving Earth uh is through 4D simulation uh most of that can be done through integrated or thirdparty software that allows that schedule that was just created to sequence the objects
Within a building as to how you might U uh build it so um in that case uh what you’re able to do is is anticipate some problems that may occur uh I’m going to step through several slides to show what a 40 simulation might look like tying uh the objects within a b
To um uh the objects in a in a schedule the um the objects in a in a construction schedule so uh here here might be day 13 of week two and um uh then we move on through day 32 day 40 day 74 and of course these are
Probably unrealistic days but just just some days assigned to a schedule to do this simulation and then finally say on day 96 the building’s finished out uh what that allows uh a contract and a design team to do is see how each component of the building might go together and and
See where you might have uh staging problems you can stage your your cranes your scaffolding your temporary facilities on job site and uh that along with the actual construction anticipate where you might have a bottleneck uh this does a couple of things one it allows you to see how the building might
Go together and and maybe give you opportunities to put it together in a in a more efficient manner but it also allows you to anticipate uh how the site might be used and to keep that site a little more clean and and and a safer and cleaner site uh by virtue of doing
That uh something that’s um turned into quite a market for several of our structural consultants and beginning uh one of one of our focuses u in the whole Building Systems side of this is to work with contractors on automating uh fabrication going straight from them into a fabrication shop uh for things
Like steel duck work and pipe um one particular structural engineer locally uh has brought on three Ste steel detailers and and pretty much is doing most of the Ben to fabrication work on a lot of the projects they do and it’s turned into a very nice new market for
Them same with uh the Manufacturing Technologies by doing that by working and coordinating schedules with your fabrication needs and your delivery needs uh you get get to a a way of basically lean construction processes just just like lean manufacturing processes again it speeds the the construction up uh it gets rid of
Clutter on the site the need for so many storage containers and keeps the site uh safer as a result finally um one of the one of the things that uh we’re working with with a local College client right now is trying to integrate their their as built their
Record documentation and those kind of things into the Bim that we created for them when we did their their job so to eliminate some of these paper based uh record documents and Link them to objects within the building so what we’ve done in this case is we we’ve created a an electronic
Systems manual uh if you will uh where things like operations and maintenance manual warranties test and balance reports those things have been created in a PDF file some of them in a spread sheeet and then those have been linked to the object in the B uh and then a simple
Reader uh has been given to the owner so that he can uh view the Bim and right click on a piece of equipment and then click to a link uh that would get into a spreadsheet or PDF document uh and then that’s been set up on the University
Server uh and we we’re learning as we go but it seems to get better on each project how we’re able toh tie those things together for them and then um we found too that on our our commercial clients we’re um you wouldn’t think well it’s not ad advantageous to use B
And say a stri Shopping Center or a um a speculative office building but uh it’s been a whole lot better to to work where we’ve got a Bim and we’re doing a tened upfit or somebody moves out and somebody else moves in uh it’s been easier and we’re we’re more confident
That our record drawings are asil and tend to spend a little less field work time uh verifying those things uh when we go out uh to do a new job within an existing building that we’ve worked on in the past uh this one’s probably a little bit
Of a pie in the sky um I know it’s being applied up at the uh Renovations that were done at the Pentagon but uh some of their um uh their Ben Technologies were link with their security and their Disaster Recovery assistance to uh uh use the
RFID tags and the access control tags to uh uh be able to uh locate people within the building and and that would be a tremendous help during a disaster or something like that to uh if someone was in distress and could signal it and then
A b could be called up to find out exactly where they are uh within the system and that work is is is is ongoing uh same with uh as we move to um to to to optimize our buildings a little more it becomes much more uh important that we’re able to do
Performance-based design and uh by having that kind of data and uh using our analytical models to uh design buildings uh should be able to economize on some of the materials and find multiple uses for uh systems within a building so that the system sizes and the number of components within a
Building can be cut down and that that’s probably a more more optimistic and and and and futuristic look at where we might go with them uh same with whole building optimization uh we we are working to uh we do not use an integrated U energy management or energy modeling uh system
Within our office it’s a third party piece of software and uh it’s it’s been a slow process but we’re getting there and I’ll step through a case study in just a second as to how we’re working toward being able to uh export data and and run
Our our loads for uh energy modeling and Equipment Siz so I just go through the case study uh fairly quickly um Define and we’ll talk about a Bim and a building performance analysis and understand the difference between what might be called a physical model uh and an analytical model we’ll talk about a
Couple of the data exchange uh methods between the two uh that that has to happen uh in order for you to take advantage of the the data that’s been captured within uh that that physical model and then some of the things that are kind of critical if you’re going to
Export data to try to run uh at least hbac loads uh to have an architect or someone that’s generating the uh the architectural design to pay attention to so physical model is just what uh we’ve been talking about uh and that’s just the geometry for for most part uh
What’s able to be used for interference checking for visualization and uh for demonstrating to a client say a tenant upfit or something like that so what has to happen uh in a physical model uh to prepare it to be used effectively in analytical model is those objects that are in this physical
Model have to have data associated with them that are useful uh in our case solar heat gain coefficients u values R values um densities weights uh Mass uh and those kind of things so um to really take advantage of the power of them uh you have to get in in into the
Habit and build into your work process and your your office standards uh the kind of data that that you’re going going to include in that that BM document uh as data attached to each object once that’s done um in this case it uh we use a third-party modeling
Software you export the data into the software and it takes a fair amount of cleanup it’s not just a straight read and run uh and it’s not parametric at this point I cannot make changes in the model after I’ve run this uh energy analysis and then a quick export and and
Run it again it it takes basically the same cleanup uh process each time you uh want to change it so uh it’s a little bit of work uh the takeoff U square footages and the areas are are the biggest advantage to speeding up the process there um how most of the interoperable
And Integrated Systems work or they use uh two different U more common data exchange formats one’s called ifc’s or International Foundation classes or gbxml or Green Building XML um and essentially these are uh when they’re exported they’re exported like text files where you uh you tag the
Start and stop of a piece of data that might be useful useful like the room name and uh what gets exported as the room name is is what’s between the two tags so um in our process and um I won’t say it’s the best process of how we
Adopted them we just plug pulled the plug on CAD six years ago bought 14 seats of a Bim authoring tool and jumped in with both feet and jumped in with both feet on our first project was a 400,000 SQ foot high school um that proved to be challenging but
Again we did pick up some efficiencies um what I would hindsight would probably say is to study your needs and anticipated uses for for Bim uh make sure the Bim tool there’s still a lot of opportunity with having to deliver documents in 2D that you’re going to
Have to do some 2D drafting uh that the authoring Tool uh has the capability to allow you to uh draw in 2D and insert 2D uh details uh that can add some inefficiency to your process too if you just try to model too many things in 3D anticipate your client software if
You’re working for a federal or a government agency uh find out what kind of software and deliverables uh they anticipate now and in the in the near future um wouldn’t want to uh invest in uh the software because it’s not cheap uh and then find out that a client
Wouldn’t accept the the files from that software um evaluate your Hardware needs I will’ll tell you that um Everybody told us that we probably needed to uh go to 64-bit machines and we have on several machines and those are only the machines that we do a lot of rendering
On we’ve actually found that our 32bit machines uh for just day-to-day work effort um are quite adequate for uh the normal work we do uh it’s it’s when you try to start doing a fair amount of Animation or photo realistic uh rendering uh that the 64bit machine come
In handy and even those in some cases run overnight or over weekend to render a building some of the tricks to if if you’re going to be rendering or or doing that photo realistic work uh and you only are concerned with uh the outside of the building and not doing fly
Flythroughs is save a copy of the file uh just strip out all the geometry inside the building and render nothing but that that exterior envelope to speed that process up uh look at several uh vendors uh give their software a try um one of the references at the the back of
The this presentation is called a little book called Big Bim uh little Bim uh it’s kind of Bim on a budget by an author named fth Jernigan and uh he he kind of suggest that if you’re not able to after three days at least with some reason able confidence generate a
Project at the level that you would be proud of showing it to a client that maybe that’s not the solution for you and that you should look at uh evaluating other software before making a decision to purchase um but just getting started um I I do believe it’s the way the industry
Is going um as a as an architectural firm or having managed an architect ual firm to capture the full benefit we really need Consultants contractors and sub contractors on on the platform as well uh training we we’ve taken a different approach uh we started out by
Sending a few people uh to training and asking them to come back and train others um we’ve actually found it better to use the software uh work out um we’ve created a group called The riters within the office uh that meet U every two weeks uh once a month someone from the
Office will do training to everybody in the office kind of uh Rising tide raises all boats um to keep uh the level of expertise within the office about the same with anybody that’s using it uh now we do have a couple of people that are better and more uh more apt at doing
Rendering uh but the other thing we’ve did done with our supplier is rather than really long uh training sessions where you get so much uh information we can’t really absorb and take back is every two months we have them down for two to four hours and we give them a
Specific list of things we’re either having issues with or things we want to uh improve upon and we’re getting a lot better uh bang for our buck out of our training and the entire office is getting much more efficient U at applying the tools same with templates and standards
If you decide to uh adopt Bim uh evaluate what you’re doing in t 2D and your old ways of doing things and really spend some time early on setting your templates and standards up it’ll save you a lot of time uh and get you up to speed much faster um schedule generation
Can be uh uh doors when hbac grills lighting uh electrical panel schedules uh those kind of things can be automated uh within them rather than than being uh hand generated in in a cab or 2D environment so spend some time early on getting those standards established and
Built into your templates uh and then I mentioned the new markets um a new market that that this um whole building systems that I’m heading up right now two of those will be uh in the coordination area for contractors that haven’t quite adopted them and
Um and the uh fabrication to uh from B to fabrication are the two areas that will’ll be focused on as far as a new market for an AE firm uh to uh to enhance and and improve our revenue and and use use the talents we’re developing inhouse for for more than just
Design uh resources uh ashray has got a nice uh little introduction to them that’s available for download for free uh the building smart Alliance uh and the national B standard National Ben standard is probably working more on interoperability standards and data dictionary information than howto guides on how to
Model uh buildings the GSA GSA Bim Guide Series that’s available on the GSA website uh has some very good data on modeling instruction and and best practices of how to set up a model uh both uh from an architectural standpoint and and an engineering standpoint and
Then the the ERS all have good white papers available how to use their specific products um and then here’s some references that I mentioned earlier the ashr Bim guide uh a handbook it’s four or five years old now called the Bim handbook by W uh excellent handbook uh probably couple of hundred different
Software packages uh it also explains the value of them not just to the owner the architect the engineer here but the contractors subcontractors Fabricators and operations and maintenance staff it’s it’s a good reference book uh the GSA Bim standards uh National Bim standard and then finally that very
Short read is the Big B little Bim by fth jurnigan that that I quite enjoy reading and it helped as we we were getting started with that that’s the end of my presentation uh I’m happy to take questions and and talk about some of the experiences we’ve
Had so Tim you want to take it back it’s David and thank you very much indeed Dennis that was very thought-provoking presentation can I ask we’ve got 25 people here in London uh are there any questions from the audience here while we’re just checking the online questions right the first one I’ve got
Is from from your experience U uh Dennis do you find that you’re actually um you’re getting closer to the design intent of the building in other words does the building operate closer to the design um I think a lot of that um has to do more with with the
Commissioning processes and the op owner training and the operation uh I I do see that we we are truly having fewer rfis or or issues that get to the point of becoming rfis and the buildings actually going together uh much closer to the way we intended uh for example the 400,000
Sqare foot high school um we’ve actually set up in the project trailer uh uh a workstation that we can remote desktop into the office uh we have issues that come up at our weekly meetings or our monthly meetings we’re we’re actually able to remote desktop in um call up the
Model um go to the particular part of the building review and talk with the contractors and subcontractors about the way we envisioned it going together even though they were working from a 2d model uh show them that it can go in the way way we anticipated uh if they will set
Things here here or there uh the other thing is is we’ve taken some of these 3D cuts out of the building and just um printed them 2D and put them up uh throughout the building so even workers And Trades people that may even have a language barrier uh from a communication
Standpoint with multiple languages on the jobsite they can see uh that picture and much more quickly and and see how we intended things to go in and U we’re we’re seeing that we’re we’re having fewer questions or or fewer issues that get to the point of becoming
Rfis thank you we’ve got a couple of questions on energy software one from Richard kampton what thirdparty energy software do you use and also from Mike Molina who’s asking for some more detail on how you can integrate BMS and building energy monitoring systems into bin
Process well I I know um and U I’m so used to doing an ashray program where we don’t mention uh products but um so I’m assuming that’s okay to mention here you can okay um actually I use uh train trace and uh I’ve used train Trace since
It was Punch Cards so it’s uh it was kind of hard for me to pry it away from my hands when we started doing this so um uh traces uh all the B authoring tools are able to export a gbxml file and what I’ve been able to do is import
That file in the trace and I will tell you that the things that I get good data from are areas and and room definitions everything within that BM um if you can think of the room as being the parent and the walls uh roofs ceilings uh Windows openings the the children of
That room um as long as the bin is set up from the architect uh where every room is defined with a room number uh if you end up uh somehow creating a bin where there are no room numbers you’ll get a lot of garbage when you export that gbxml and
Bring it in to say Trace um what Trace does not handle very well or what gbxml doesn’t seem to handle in in my perspective right now are voids uh have to correct for the space above ceilings or if I have columns in a room um and I want to extract that that
Area from from my model or include that area I have to go back and be very careful at checking the model for spaces like that if your walls don’t go to the deck and uh you don’t have a a good uh good definition of that room you’ll get garbage so
Uh it’s it’s it’s a good quick tool to get areas and square footages out of but you have to be careful on on relying on the other data uh most of the manufacturers I know uh and I’ll just I’ll just mention a couple and and and
Drew Crawley may even be on the the call today but uh Bentley is is working uh on U integrating uh some of their analytical uh tools into U into working much more closely uh with with their BM authoring tool um another popular uh software well um
Auto desks Revit and and their ECOT Tech and green green building studio uh Green Building Studio seems to have to be run very early uh uh when you basically got more more uh just height scale and mass uh it it bogs down when you start adding
A lot of detail to the building and then their Ecotech software is more their design software that works again with a with a gbxml file okay and we’ve got question yes you did thank you uh another question uh full of a room full of consultant Engineers here and so they’ve got down
To the money uh so question of really do you find that offering a Bim puts an increase on fees and also in your experience are the clients prepared to pay the additional fees and that question is from Phil Todd okay well uh Phil it’s I think it’s
About like everything else most of the clients don’t want to pay a lot more money for anything uh they assume if we’re using a newer technology that we ought to be able to do it faster quicker and cheaper uh not been able to really
Charge a premium for B uh in in the work that we do um where we have picked up a little more revenue for using them has been in offering the other services some coordination and actually uh drawing some documents in 3D for people that don’t have the technology
Yet but we’ve not really had an owner that would pay us a premium for a b now early on our Consultants the when we we’ve got about three mechanical electrical Plumbing consultants and two structural uh Consultants that now do all their work in B uh but early on they did give us
Um a premium fee for doing the job in them versus letting them work in a 2d environment uh that has somewhat disappeared uh as they’ve gotten better and more comfortable with coordinating their work within our our drawings and and also they’re getting better at the
Hardest part was to go from 3D back to a 2d presentation and that that took quite a bit of a learning curve but uh right now we’re not seeing a premium for it hello there I’m my name’s Derk Allen I’m here in the uh in the room in London
My question I’m a an end user for buildings excuse me end user for buildings and uh earlier in your presentation you had a uh a graph that explained how the costs uh could change U I’m sort of trying to get some quantitive uh value on that is is it
Overall does it make the project cheaper I suppose is what I’m asking whether on you can qualify that for us I overall I think it does I don’t think we’re at the point of optimizing the building to where where all the components have gotten to the point that
They’re as big as they need to be uh but um we we have and traditionally we we’ve had good uh low change order rates for non-owner generated changes but our our change order rate is is less than 1% uh on for non-owner unforeseen conditions coordination erors and those
Kind of things so uh I think from that standpoint it is saving money I don’t think it’s saving money on the initial bids at this point and I have similar question from two people Mike Bernie and ol FEI ainola and it’s typically uh who has primary ownership of the Bim model during design
And through construction well um and that’s that’s a that’s a question I see brought up at almost every meeting I go to um so far u in the work we’ve done we we’ve own owned the model uh and we just uh and that’s purely because we’ve not had an owner
Um or a contractor requests the need to own the model uh we we do uh provide the model to contractors to do their um when they have the capability to do their Construction level detailing uh but it’s done very carefully and with some uh fairly uh detailed home home harmless
Agreements and no guarantees on electronic transfers and those kind of things but we’ve not gotten into a a situation where uh we’ve done say a um integrated project delivery process where the model moved from us to the contractor to the S subcontractors completely at this
Point as a follow on to that there’s uh also if you do a fully coordinated 3D model do you sell the model to the contractors and that’s from I think Richard kampton if Tim would just we actually do if if the contractor at this point um request the model to do to take
It and uh we have an actual fee schedule for each each sheet or each set of documents uh that we provide them uh that that goes into the bid documents or into the contract documents uh and it depends purely if they’re looking for 2D uh conversion to
2D drawings to do uh do coordination drawings or if they’re looking for 3D and and we we basically have a flat rate uh schedule that goes into our our our front end documents division one so we let them know up front that that it’s available and if they’re able
To use it then use it to their advantage that that they can get it okay thank you um now from William odonnell does Bim allow for calculations of things like daylight daylight Factor modeling natural ventilation appraise or heat loss and heat gain calculations or can the model be easily
Exported or can the can the model be exported easily to other software systems well um again it only takes about uh 10 seconds to export a a gbxml file uh again though the the key is having the model uh complete before you do it or or know where the model is not
Complete so you can go right to the point in your your analytical software and and fix those things before you start uh doing design iterations uh but it’s it’s it’s very easy to export uh uh both quantities areas uh if you’ve built cost into the objects um
That’s very easy to do and very easy to do right now that’s that’s not a future thing uh it’s uh quite easy to do and then there are several third-party vendors that that can take advantage of that data to run uh daylight models and energy models okay the last couple of questions
One from Derek molds uh regarding Clash detection does the system automatically generate detect clashes between different elements EG full height partitions and ductwork pip workor um it does and in some cases it will give you clashes uh that you not normally would want to uh to investigate in a in a 2d
Environment for example um it will you run a clash detection at least in in our software and uh it’ll tell you that the drillings on the sink that the plumbing engineer picked are not the same size as the the drillings for the the fixture trim that’s uh in the top of
The cabinet and and things like that things that would be easily adjusted in the field you’ll get a you’ll get a lot of clashes in in in some cases and you just have to uh get used to knowing which ones are the ones that are serious and the ones
That that we can tend to ignore thank you and and finally uh who do you see Bim specialist working for direct for the client main contractor design team or for the subcontractors and that’s from itad in London Mark Robinson and and T I guess I’d ask when
When you say B specialist you mean someone that’s uh a a a Bim coordinator uh versus a a designer or a contractor that’s using Bim are you I mean you are you asking yes I guess I guess the person who owns the model I guess um ultimately I think the owner is going
To own the model maybe not the uh proprietary design processes or the construction processes built into it but from the standpoint of owning and operating uh that facility I see the owner is ultimately be being the owner of that and and and really they they own our 2D
Documents for that purpose now uh they just don’t own our copyrighted and and and trade protective information fine thank you um it would be remiss of me uh as we’ve got some listeners in Australia not to to uh hope you’re not living in Brisbane but also not to mention the cricket very sorry
About that that won’t mean anything to you at all Dennis but believe you me it means an awful lot to us at this end uh normally at the end of a webinar you’re in receipt of a one-handed clap I.E silence we have the privilege here of 25 people who’ve really enjoyed your
Presentation so I’d ask them to show their appreciation on behalf of everybody wherever you are thank you