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Running large commercial BIM projects

A previous MSc student discusses their experience moving from study to running large projects incorporating BIM.
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NOHMAN: My recent project is Midland Metropolitan Hospital and that hospital project is a BIM Level 2 Scheme. It is about £430 million scheme. I had to make sure BIM is properly implemented and is handed over to the client accordingly as well. The process while people are working during the design stage as well during the construction stage and the target is to deliver our BIM deliverables according to the contractual requirements. The major issue is the cultural issue. Everyone have got their own way of working so you’re not dealing with your own organisation, internal organisational change management, you’re dealing with the external organisational change management. I would categorise the external client in four different categories.
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One is the design consultants who have to give us the fundamental BIM models. They’re already aware of BIM requirements. The second category is a specialist supply chain. They still have the design responsibility, they have to give us the design models. They are well in net one comparative to the other supply chain. The third category is the supply chain who are taking the design model, they’re not producing any design information, but they are producing information for construction level of details. This could be for lighting specialist, the modular wiring and specialist sprinkler systems. There is a fourth category which is a supply chain, manufacturers and suppliers. They would just give you the BIM objects with families and possibly different file formats.
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But this third category was the most challenging one. Everyone works in, for example, CAD. Everyone is up to speed with using AutoCAD but as soon as you tell them, okay here is a BIM model. We don’t know what to do with that so give us CAD format, and we say, we can’t give you the CAD specific format the exact same way as you want. Here is a BIM model. Utilise this BIM model. Extract the right information you need. No, we don’t have those abilities. Then we say okay, guys you have signed up a contract for a BIM Level 2 Scheme. So this is BIM Level 2 Schemes you have to work in this Scheme in this particular way.
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If you need more support, how to get the right information using BIM models, I am here to help you, but you’ve got to do it yourself. So, all of these three categories excluding the consultants, I gave them the right training, right support according to their own needs. I managed to bring them all together and communicate using BIM models rather than just use the traditional way of working of 2D drawings and commenting on the 2D drawings.

In this video, Nohman Awan explains the difficulties and opportunities of using BIM in large multinational projects.

As required by the UK government, the project Nohman discusses adopted BIM level 2. While this helped with addressing the obvious issues in collaboration, other issues emerged regarding adoption of BIM by the various groups of experts involved.

Issues can arise in large project partnerships when partners have differing levels of expertise in implementing BIM.

BIM is also adopted in various formats and levels by construction experts. This becomes a problem when the consultants are required to work at a specific BIM level, in this case, level 2, as required by the UK government.

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This content is taken from
Coventry University online course,

An Introduction to Building Information Modelling

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The problem is worse when the experts are from overseas and use different standards.

Your task

Either identify an international commercial project or discuss your own experiences of international projects.
Did the presence of differing standards used by the international partners cause problems? And, if so, how were these resolved?

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This content is taken from Coventry University online course
An Introduction to Building Information Modelling
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An Introduction to Building Information Modelling

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