Feature BIM briefing

(Before Scott Wilson, he was business systems director at Costain, and he has also chalked up spells with John Laing and Trafalgar House, which later became part of Skanska). If it was saving money and helping streamline projects nearly two decades back, why has it been so slow to take off? “The technology has matured; people

have learnt how to use the tools and we’re at a point in time where we couldn’t carry on as we were,“ explains Bew. “We’ve just got to reduce costs.” A recent survey from National Building Specification shows the message is getting through: almost a third of professionals are now using BIM, compared with just 13% in 2010, and three quarters of those who are aware of it predict they will be using it in 2012. However, the survey also indicated that BIM remains poorly defined and understood with four out of five of those questioned agreeing that the industry is not yet clear on what BIM is. Bew’s job is not about defining BIM for the whole industry, but for the needs of government clients. However, the complexity of the management structure he’s overseeing confirms the difficulty of the task. He talks of a small battalion of

folk “pushing” and “pulling” BIM adoption. A group made up of representatives from government departments with input from local authorities is doing the “ pulling” or setting out its expectations, how they need to operate and structure their own departments and to use BIM services. It’s almost forcing clients back to first principles of procurement. Meanwhile industry groups are doing the “pushing”: the professions, the contractors, and software suppliers, and academics, to name four of the working groups involved. These groups are working through the impact BIM will have on the industry’s administrative infrastructure and training requirements. For example, how does BIM work with

professional indemnity insurance? How might contracts need to change? A task group led by Simon Rawlinson,

“We’re talking about bringing about change across a programme which has a multi-billion pound capital and operations budget. It’s a massive exercise.”

Mark Bew

a director at EC Harris, is to look at any changes that may be necessary to insurance and contracts for implementing Level 2 BIM. The MoJ pathfinders will use the PPC2000, but the partnering contract has been slightly updated. Bew is confident, though, that any contractual changes for Level 2 won’t amount to more than a few lines. All of these “push” and “pull”

committees report into Bew’s steering committee, and from there into the Government Construction Board, and finally the Efficiency and Reform Group in the Cabinet Office. Central to making Level 2 BIM

construction projects run smoothly is ensuring that everyone starts using the same data formats and timings on data delivery. The government has specified the format that has to be adopted — called the Construction Operations Building Information Exchange or COBie, a piece of open source software that can be downloaded at www.bimtaskgroup.org.

Plans of work However, much of what this entails, in terms of the supply of information to the client, runs counter to what’s currently specified in the various industry plans of work. (These set out what documentation is meant to be delivered to the client and when. Stage B, is the design brief and so on). So one of the biggest challenges is the unification of the plans of work across the professions. In the world of COBie and BIM some of these so called “data-drops” — or stages at which clients or organisations receive information — are now redundant. This new unified plan of work has now been agreed by the by the CIC and being tested. In Level 2 BIM, information on specifications and drawings say, passes into a shared BIM model, but the information remains proprietary. Some BIM experts claim the government is wasting the potential of the technology by not encouraging full information sharing — perhaps based on “cloud computing” — where there is one model that is updated at will. Bew says there are two reasons for this.

“Software vendors may be keen to sell capabilities, but really the true definition

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