project progressed. This is in direct contrast to the idea of BIM, which allows everyone in the supply chain to add content to a unified model.
The construction industry is one of the last areas of global business to adopt standardization and refine information management processes in order to generate efficiency. You can argue that construction activities are manufacturing of a sort. Construction is the creation of an object made of many components; that object just happens to be a very complex project containing hundreds of thousands of advanced sub-objects like steel beams, timber, bricks, and concrete. Nothing prevents construction from leading innovation rather than playing catch-up with the manufacturing sector, but it needs to understand the power of information.
Realizing That Information Is the Heart of BIM
Think of how you currently share information with others on a project. Perhaps your inbox is full of emails with attachments, or you receive paper documents via postal mail. Even when you access shared, digital information by using central drives or cloud-based storage, often the information is a certain kind or accessed only by a specific team.
Construction is full of data, but most people have never really made the most of it. For decades, in order to access data you needed to have a physical copy of it, on CD or paper, or digital versions, such as a PDF. Now multiple users can see the same data online at the same time. The industry needs to move from a mind-set of multiple users owning their data individually, to collectively maintaining one accurate and up-to-date version of the information, with many people accessing it whenever necessary. You can describe this as moving from documents to data. In a literal sense, information is the middle word in BIM, and you should think of information as the beating heart that keeps BIM moving. Building modeling has existed for a long time; the addition of consistent and open data to the mix gives BIM its power to change these traditional processes.
Of all the information embedded in your virtual project, everybody needs access to at least one piece of information. Some need to run thousands of queries, and some need access to everything in order to coordinate the model. Information flows from concept to demolition.
✔ Generators of information: They are BIM users, such as the client or concept designers, who will be generating initial information, adding data as it becomes known, and continuing to improve the model by evolving existing parameters in the model. Information generation happens all the way through the project timeline.
✔ Reviewers of information: They are the users who need to make decisions to progress the design or construction work who will be analyzing the data already in the model and reviewing how to achieve the required levels of performance or to collaborate to avoid clashes in geometry. The majority of a project delivery team will be reviewers.
✔ Receivers of information: They are the end-users of the data in BIM, using either live project data or exporting the documents, reports, and drawings. For instance, the caretaker janitor of a public school or library may want to generate maintenance information from the model or pass information to the client.
You can begin to see how information is the heart of BIM when you see how the data evolves and grows as users add to it and how it will be interrogated and extracted by others across the project timeline. The following sections look at the generators, reviewers, and receivers of information in greater detail.
Generators of information are the briefing, design, and early development teams. These teams produce the fundamental information at the start of the project. Alongside the design geometry at this stage, think of the following.
Site information
The location of the site may be obvious, but it carries a huge amount of embedded information about the environmental conditions and quality of land. Geographic information systems (GIS) and BIM evolved independently, but they have a lot in common. You can find hundreds of examples where infrastructure contractors have successfully married the two to improve projects at a macro scale. You can use GIS to understand the effect of topography and your site conditions on a proposed development.
Outline and performance specification
Understanding the client’s requirements for the project is a fundamental part of the design process, and without a good brief you can’t begin modeling. Rather than thinking of the briefing and specification as two separate activities, use master specification tools to generate an outline specification as early in the project as possible and then use that record as a foundation for developing the full specification.
Say that a wall in your project has specific performance requirements (fire resistance or acoustic reduction) but the design team or client can’t decide on construction type. Specification tools allow you to record the performance requirements as part of the building information model. You can then link a placeholder object (such as a generic blank wall) in the geometry with the relevant specification data. This is a great example of something you can’t model with 3D CAD alone.
Planning code requirements
You can now find examples of where you can embed into the information model local code requirements like proximity to neighboring buildings or trees, limits on the height of buildings, and sustainability factors such as regional public transport routes. Doing so instantly increases your understanding of the impact of planning codes on your development, speeds up the design process, and can even help you justify your development to planning officials. We demonstrate some exemplar tools in Chapter 19.
Reviewers of the model are detailed design and technical design teams and consultants, such as structural engineers and mechanical engineers working together with architects, lighting designers, landscape designers, and the wider supply chain. Consider that the whole project team could be involved by this stage. In the following sections, we help you see how reviewers of the model coordinate, collaborate, and use the data BIM provides to the project team.
