BIM Summit Qatar - Day Four

The conference started today with Mott Macdonald's Derek Murray chairing. Derek's introduced two case studies from the UK of really complex projects where BIM was being used to demonstrate real day-to-day gains. The first was from Mott Macdonald with Andy Smith and Rob Dickson really giving the inside story on the London Victoria Underground Station project. One thing they stressed as being of critical importance was the importance of a strong BIM execution plan. The picture below summarises what is in a typical MM plan...

Fig 1 - What is covered in the BIM Execution Plan

The slide below shows the size of the task in keeping the stakeholders happy on a project. As the construction is beneath existing buildings - there is a lot that needs done to ensure everything goes smoothly.

Fig 2 - Don't disrupt the Victoria Palace Theatre where Billy Elliott plays each evening!

One interesting concept that was discussed was the "Corridor of BIM potential". This was a number of tasks that had to be agreed at the start. The complexity grew with the further along the "Corridor of BIM potential" you walked. The first item was 3D CAD and then it developed through to delivering a digital model to manage the asset.

Nigel Clark from Hilson Moran was next up. This case study was 20 Fenchurch Street which had been designed to be BREEAM Excellent and to significantly exceed the UK Building Codes and Regulations. Some great slides below - also very interesting to hear it reinforced that BIM in the UK is not just about the UK Gov Strategy, the private big private clients are now insisting on BIM - Great Portland Estates, Land Securities and Canary Wharf Group.

Fig 3 - I love seeing the original pen-and-paper sketch design alongside the detail design

Fig 4 - Some of the engineering to maintain this roof top garden was extremely impressive

Fig 5 - BIM = a single model - not in the real world it ain't - federated models

The day wasn't all a promotion of UK excellence. There were also some case studies from the Middle East. Dar Al Riyadh from Saudi were involved in some particularly impressive projects. There were plenty of beautiful tall buildings - but the screenshot below is of interest for a different reason. Classed as a "MEGAPROJECT" - it appears to be worthy of the name with 500,000 housing units being built from BIM designs. When building on that scale a tiny percentage saving is clearly multiplied to be huge.

Fig 6 - Mega Projects - Middle East Style

After the break then the design consultants were invited up on stage to take questions from the floor. There was a lot of discussion about what status the BIM holds contractually and again the importance of BIM execution plans were reinforced. One bit of advice handed to the Qatar delegates was that if a Government mandated BIM, it is not a simple task of writing a document and then walking away. It needs the full strategy executed. And not least of these is the communication of the strategy and the sharing of knowledge and resources. Again, everyone from the UK spoke extremely highly about the UK BIM movement.

Fig 7 - Expert panel discuss

I had the job of presenting to conclude the speakers' section of the conference. As this blog post is going on a bit I'll not say much about my message (I'll cover this in a separate article). But the general message was that where BIM is currently delivering is (a) drawing production, (b) visualisation and (c) eliminating clashes - where it needs to now deliver is in well-structured information behind the objects. Localised standard generic objects with corresponding manufacturer objects that can help the information part of BIM really fly.

"Make it quick Hamil, lunch is in 20 minutes"

Throughout these sessions credit must be given to Mott Macdonald's Derek Murray who did a great job with excellent commentary, good time keeping and humour. He summarised the conference well with two quotes from yesterday:
"Play well together and enjoy the new team sport that is BIM"

And finally...
Derek also introduced himself to me by commenting on my 1000th tweet blog post on the seven slides to include in every BIM presentation. He had carefully scored up the presentations in terms of the ones that managed to squash the slides in. You can see from the pic below that there was a loss of count for "BIM Models" on day one and then the magenta clash detection slides and confusing ROI chart tied for first place with six presentations each. I feel that BIM Bingo Infographic PDFs need to be produced for future conferences.

BIM Bingo with @DerekMurray1975