SSH

Reinardt Bronkhorst

Business Information Modelling (BIM) has seen tremendous changes and technological developments over the past decade—all of which added positively towards the industry. However, as with any change, comes new challenges. One being the issue surrounding the validity and accuracy of information.

In an industry where information modeling is progressing at an ever-increasing pace, we produce more information than we can consume. We conceptualize it by means of mass models, we analyze it by means of energy models, and we document it by means of building models. The verification of BIM has become crucial for the modern practice. For SSH, the validity and accuracy of information is now more critical than ever in our commitment to meeting project goals.

To ensure we successfully meet this challenge throughout project delivery, the SSH BIM team was tasked with developing a customized modeling audit process in line with ISO 19650 guidelines on best practice information sharing protocols. To achieve this, our team relied on Dynamo—one of the most influential visual programming tools introduced to the BIM industry over the last five years. We managed to develop a custom-built Dynamo script to automate the extraction of project as well as discipline-specific information from models, feeding the said statistical results into a Power BI Dashboard to reflect the health of not only the models, but also the information contained within them. As a vital process conduit between the design and client teams, the BIM team ensure we have an early warning system in place to validate the production team’s information models, thereby ensuring that when the Design team meets with the client, contractor or other project stakeholders, they have reliable project information at hand that is vital for decision making.

As SSH is an international consultant with projects located across the GCC and teams not necessarily operating from the same office or even country, we are pleased to say that our BIM team has become very reliant on ISO BIM standards to guide our processes regarding information sharing. Through partnering our process management with Autodesk’s BIM 360, we can simultaneously give live project access to all our teams, external consultants and clients. This not only allows us to ensure that reliable information exchange takes place within shorter time periods, but also grants clients access to live design files for instant review on current project data sets, thereby sidestepping the chance of working on different and/or outdated files.

Another challenge that the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) sector faces globally, is time constraints caused by project time lines that are narrowing whilst project scopes are increasing. 

This brings me to the next challenging issue of ‘automation’—a process often involving the use of the ‘quick fix button’; that mysterious tool that changes a week’s variation order (VO) into a simple, one-click action.

In truth, automation simply cannot be effectively achieved without standardization and collaboration, both of which take time, thought and effort. It should be noted that before automating tasks related to a project, a robust standard for production on which to build automation first needs to be developed. While the industry has many sources for content readily available on the internet, it’s imperative to remember that those sources are built on their own unique standards. It is thus advised that a BIM team rather build its own content that is relevant to the requirements of a specific project’s designers as well as engineers, bearing in mind their specific workflow while choosing the correct industry standard for level of detail (LOD) and level of information (LOI). Only once all content has been standardized for the project at hand, automation can be applied successfully.

Since most of SSH’s projects fall within the ‘mega’ category and delivering such projects within tight time frames are often challenging, SSH made the strategic decision of hiring an inhouse Specialist Application Engineer who developed Dynamo graphs for our teams to achieve automation faster and more effectively in both production and design. This was done for rudimentary tasks such as creating production sheets and views, as well as more complex tasks such as drawing electrical or mechanical analyses values from models into country-specific engineering schedules.

To conclude, as a workforce in the AEC sector, we find ourselves operating in a fast-paced, competitive industry in which service delivery is everything. Decisions regarding projects often need to be made under pressure and within short time periods. Architect and engineering teams often face challenging project delivery time constraints that are magnified by exacting project scopes. However, the 21^st century has brought about a valuable tool that, if used properly and in a knowledgeable manner, can make a vast difference. BIM has become a well-known established extensive collaborative process and an important area of development in the AEC sector, generating a common language for all divisions of parties and systems involved in a project. The use of BIM has proven to not only improve the information quality needed for making critical design decisions, but it is also a valuable tool that can speed up the automation process, thereby ensuring that project deadlines are met.

As BIM Lead of a multidisciplinary company, I would like to encourage other companies of this ever-evolving industry to embrace technology and use the tools it gives us to deliver world-class projects.