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Transforming Construction Introduction

2 The Real Problems

3 Building Information Management

4 BIM in Design

5 BIM in Procurement

6 BIM in Construction

7 BIM - The EPOS Analogy

8 Conclusion

Design Data Guidelines

Preamble

Construction projects are highly information-intensive enterprises. On all but the smallest, simplest projects, large numbers of firms generate enormous amounts of technical information, most of which has to be communicated to others and much of which will be re-used, or re-worked in some way, by other firms on the project.

Most of this information will have been created on computer systems of one sort or another, used in such a way as to maximise the internal efficiency of the originating firm. It's become clear in recent years that while such local efficiencies are highly desirable, the real key to economy in construction comes from getting the project team as a whole - the project as a complete enterprise - to perform more effectively. There are many issues which need to be considered in approaching this challenge, but managing the complex flows of technical information is one of the most important.

This paper has two purposes:

• To describe very briefly the key steps that the project team should take to improve their management of project information.
• To encourage teams actually to take these steps, by demonstrating just how easy most of them are, if they are started early and are championed by the leaders of the project.

There are surprisingly few useful (or usable) sources of information on this subject for the general project manager. The most useful, certainly the most approachable, general guide to modern CAD usage, though now somewhat out of date and AutoCAD based, is The CAD Good Practice Guide, by The Ove Arup Partnership, published by the Construction Industry Computing Association, 1994. The British Standard BS 1192:Part 5 (1998) also provides some guidance on the structuring and use of CAD data.

We, C3 Systems, provided the checklist that follows to the team working under the auspices of the Building Centre Trust on improved collaboration on projects. This formed the basis of the team's main deliverable the "Project Information Exchange (PIX) Protocol."

The Checklist

• 1.0 Information Management Strategy
• Develop an explicit, written Information Management Strategy for the project, don't just expect it to happen.
• Start early, if possible before conceptual design is complete
• Persuade the principal consultants to commit to the Strategy; ensure that all construction contracts and sub-contracts support its implementation.
• Focus on technical/design information. Commercial information - correspondence and such like - is relatively unimportant and, since it is generally private, should be dealt with by the individual firms concerned, rather than by the project as a whole.

• 2.0 Design Management
• Publish for general use a definitive - cleaned up - set of the survey information. Agree who will manage it and the rules for how it is to be used and updated.
• Similarly, agree and publish the building grid system. Ensure everyone is using exactly the same grid with the same origin and orientation. Establish who is to 'own' / manage the grid, generally either the Architect or Structural Engineer.
• Agree drawing sizes and scales and, if necessary, a standard drawing tiling system. The designers may prefer to work with small numbers of large drawings, but it's much better for everyone else if you can work with drawing sizes/scales that allow the general arrangements to be easily legible at A3 size.
• Agree with the designers that they will produce their drawings on a trade package-specific basis, with a separate set of coordination G.A.'s.
• If the consultants are going to review/coordinate each other's drawings, establish which individual will be responsible, element by element.
• Agree who in each practice is going to review specialist/trade contractors' drawings, and who will be the lead reviewer, package by package.
• Agree and publish the designers' drawing production schedules, showing planned issue dates for documentation packages at Preliminary, Issue for Design, Issue for Tender, Issue for Contract, and Issue for Construction stages.

• 3.0 IT Standards Generally
• Network the project. The minimum provision should be Internet e-mail and Internet based document and CAD file exchange using one of the repository services, running on a Broadband service.
• On larger projects a managed network with proper document control and CAD file management services should be considered.
• On a large project or one of long duration, the project cannot afford to have mixed standards or to change these during the course of the project. Therefore corporate QA procedures and IT standards must take second place to those agreed for the project. Start out with the latest and best standards for the project's purposes.
• The vast majority of people on a construction project will need simply to view or print drawings and other technical documents. A relatively small minority of people will be in a position to re-use or edit other people's information. These are quite different types of requirement, but you should aim to satisfy both, so protocols and accompanying standards must be agreed for managing information both in live, editable formats and in read only, un-editable formats. These are dealt with in the following two sections.

• 4.0 CAD File Management.

The CAD file management function aims to ensure that the project's CAD files are reasonably well made, that they conform to agreed, project-specific standards and that they can easily and reliably be re-used or edited by other approved members of the project team.

• The first and most important rule in CAD file interchange or re-use is that anyone who uses another person's data - e.g. reference files, etc. - in his work, becomes fully responsible for the content of the resultant CAD file.
• Agree on a CAD file format to be used as the standard project interchange format. At the moment the best - in the sense that it's the most widely used - is the dwg format, which is written and read by most AEC CAD applications. Note that firms do not have to use the particular CAD application; the requirement is simply that whatever application they do use is capable of reading and writing dwg files accurately.
• If possible, base the project CAD standards on BS 1192 Part 5, 1998.
• Agree on the CAD model origin and scales; 1:1 in millimetres, with the origin at 0,0,0 is best.
• Align the building orientation with the survey so that setting out information can be extracted without transformation.
• Agree on a CAD file and layer naming convention, or at least get everyone to publish their internal firm's standards and make sure they stick to them.
• Issue project standard drawing title blocks and get people to use them sensibly. In particular, use the Revision Notes fields intelligently, to inform users of changes made to the drawing.
• Encourage the team to use 'intelligent' library objects in their CAD design work - attributed blocks or cells and the like - rather than simple lines and arcs and so on.
• Set standard view-port centres and extents for drawings as part of the standard drawing templates. And do not allow people to change these at plot time.
• Whenever a new drawing or drawing revision is issued into the project, the originator should upload a copy of the CAD files which were used to generate it to the repository or to the CAD management system on the project server. Existing CAD files should be over written by new revisions.
• As with the interchange of live CAD files, agree on common document formats and file standards if you intend to enable people to re-use others' non-drawing documents from word processors, spreadsheets and the like. The latest Microsoft formats are probably best.

• 5.0 Design Production Management.

In the C3 Insight system we define a construction deliverable as being the result of a single construction process carried out on a single building component. This is the fundamental level of analysis and management. Similarly a design deliverable can be defined as being a single revision phase of a single technical document, where revisions phases are as shown in the table below:

Manhour estimates and costs can be applied to individual deliverables which can be grouped into processes and packages as described above for construction deliverables. The design deliverables can be managed in the C3 TDM system which integrates fully with Insight.

It's crucial when a deliverable is presented as Issued for Tender, for example, that it is approved as being fit for this purpose by the relevant project manager or package manager, not simply issued by its originator.