Open to All BIM session 23rd March

By Iain Miskimmin

On the 23^rd of March COMIT held an Open to All session aimed at giving a common understanding to all parties about this thing called “BIM”.

Even though it was sponsored by one of our technology members, Bentley Systems and we are a mobile technology community, the session was not about software but about the background, reasons, standards, methods and principles that need to be understood and linked together to really understand what it’s all about.

The 16 strong audience was made up of Owners, Contractors, Consultants, Universities and Technology vendors. Some were just starting down their BIM journey, others were BIM consultants for their organisations, which meant that the conversations and discussions surrounding each area of interest were a learning curve for everyone!

The session started with the financial crash and looking at what options the UK had for growing the economy. This spawned the Construction Strategy and ultimately the drive to deliver BIM on all government funded assets.

Taking the audience through the Government Soft Landings document and it’s vision for a more socially, economically and environmentally positive outcome for our assets, it then plunged down through the details of what is an asset, how do we break then down, and how we ought to identify the duty rather than the product.

Finally taking everyone through the 8 pillars of BIM wisdom and making sure they know why they are being asked to comply with things like COBie, Uniclass and the suite of 1192 documents.

The big lesson from the event was that we have things in place to manage, process, secure, classify, exchange, number and identify our assets, but we are still lacking the fundamental building block of WHAT information we require at each stage (not for a product but for an assets duty).

This information is needed to answer the critical questions throughout the life-cycle, but these still have not been clearly defined.

Everyone in the audience will have different critical questions to answer, depending on how they engage and interact with an asset, but they all understood that delivering the information using the same classification, asset data dictionary, templates, libraries, coordinate systems, standards and workflows ensures that there is a consistency involved that significantly reduces the risk of whole life-cycle asset procurement.

Some of the COMIT member feedback so far:

“Your fire and your enthusiasm for the topic “BIM” was absolutely infective and exemplary.” - Owner

“May everyone get the chance to join one of your presentations, you are indeed preparing the ground for reaching a new level in the construction fields.” - Owner

“I found it extremely useful and very interesting” - Contractor

“Highly impressed of what can be done and we all took inspiration and understanding with us” – Consultant

“The best BIM overview I have seen delivered anywhere. It’s a must for all people interested in this subject” - Contractor

“Presented in such a way we can all understand what our part is in the BIM story” - Academics

“Thank you for your time and extremely interesting and well-articulated presentation, even though we felt ourselves BIM aware, this session took us to new levels of understanding” – Technology Vendor

If you would like to know more about BIM or COMIT, then please visit our website or contact us to see how you could get involved.