Czech BIM Council - BIM Day 2012

Yesterday I attended the Czech BIM Council annual conference in Prague. A big focus of the conference was BIM in the UK. I personally think that the recent enthusiasm for digital construction in the UK strengthened by the UK Government's BIM strategy is now really getting noticed around the world.

One particular movement that is gaining a lot of momentum is the OpenBIM movement. The two opening speakers Lutz Bettels from Bentley and Leif Granholm from Tekla both promoted this. Lutz opened the conference with the super short promotional movie for OpenBIM. He then looked at a number of case studies from Denmark where the return on investment had been clearly demonstrated. Small housing refurbishment projects with 10% savings through to the £100m KPMG HQ that has demonstrated 15% savings.

Dr Tuba Kocaturk from Salford University then spoke about the conceptual "single model" approach and looked at whether this may be possible now or in the future. I think the feeling was that currently multiple integrated models are required. It was nice meeting another member of the Salford University team involved in BIM - alongside universities like Northumbria it looks like some great research is taking place. A big "well done" to Dr K too for standing in and doing an ad-hok second presentation after a speaker had cancelled!

Pavel Hladik then presented a number of huge sports stadium projects that AECOM are involved in. Some of these construction projects take your breath away. Check out the designs for the Singapore Sports Hub from AECOM/Arup...
- http://singaporearchitecture.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/71-sports-hub-by-aecom-arup-sport-and-dp-architects/

Pavel Hladik presents some amazing Sport Stadium designs

One refreshingly honest benefits of using BIM that Pavel stated was "so that our design teams can be better than the competition".

Richard Shennan from Mott MacDonald was another of the UK speakers. Richard gave a pragmatic view on how BIM is happening at the moment. Multiple models with touch points (see diagram in photo below). The contract documentation is still 2D and on paper/PDF - but the companies that can generate this from a BIM are the ones that can produce the contract documentation the most efficiently and accurately. There was a nice quote from Richard when discussing why the big contractors are using BIM, "The big contractors are not using BIM because the government are telling them to... they are using it simply due to the benefits it is giving them".

Richard Shennan from Mott MacDonald

It wasn't all speakers from the UK. When a Czech presentation took place then headphones had been provided so that English translations could be heard. When Ing. Milan Hampl spoke it worked well to listen to the translation whilst watching him and following his slides. Hampl looked at standards through the ages, from the Egyptian prototype models for pyramids through to how the standard we take for granted the metre was defined.

Headphones for delegates that couldn't quite follow in Czech, or English... or Geordie :)

The slide below looks at BIM adoption across the world. Fantastic to see our NBS National BIM Survey being quoted by presenters from the Czech Republic.

BIM adoption around the world

I was the final speaker of the day and had an hour for the lecture. I think twenty minutes is the longest I have ever spoken for previously, so it was interesting planning for a longer period. The first twenty minutes I spoke about BIM in the UK and in particular the UK government's BIM strategy - similar to the presentation I did at ecobuild. I had had the privilege to watch Mark Bew present to buildingSMART international committee members last month - so I hope I managed to pick up some tips and do a decent job. The picture below shows the BIMTaskGroup.org website being promoted. It is fair to say that there is huge interest in what is currently happening in the UK.

For the second and third part of the presentation I decided I wouldn't send everyone to sleep by continuing with Powerpoint, so I switched to demonstrating National BIM Library content and also how the specification can play a big part in BIM by playing around with software. No crashes = success :)

Myself

My concluding thoughts on the day was what I find strange is that people say that only "50-60% of the construction information is in the BIM". "Realistically, that is what is modelled". My view on this is that we must be more ambitious. We must not fall into the trap of equating "The BIM" with just the ArchiCAD or Bentley or Revit model. By digitalising all of the information - the full specification, including workmanship and FM information we can push that percentage of modelled information nearer to 100%. And if we can have clever software to help export to a single model representation such as COBie (or even dare I say it IFC?) then this must be our aim.

(Finally a big thank you to Petr and Marika for making the day such a success and also making me so welcome. It was certainly a good night in the bar afterwards too - until the early hours of the next morning - that Czech beer is certainly quite strong :)).

Careers at NBS

There are a number of jobs are currently advertised at NBS.
- http://www.thenbs.com/corporate/careers.asp

There is an Interface Designer and three Graduate Software Developer posts in our Research and Development team. For more information on how we design and develop software please see the following blog posts:

• http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/how-ribacpdcom-was-developed.html
• http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/nbs-domestic-specification-how-it-was.html
• http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2010/03/how-annotator-tool-from-nbs-was.html

We also have a BIM Author and Freelance Structural Engineer in our Technical Team and a BIM/NBS Create trainer in our Training Team.

For more information on this area of work please see our BIM topic area of our website:

• http://www.theNBS.com/BIM

For the full job adverts for each of these posts please see - http://www.thenbs.com/corporate/careers.asp

Pictures from Prague II

Some more pictures from day two...

The university campus

Nice mature landscape in amongst the buildings

Work from the final year students on display

Weather no different from UK

Poor pig - didn't know that it's life was recorded forerver

..and to finish with, the full size models of blokes having a wee

openBIM - The Sky is the Limit

Czech BIM Day opens with the openBIM "The Sky is the Limit" video. This is the same video previewed at the buildingSMART Singapore conference. It's quite a nice introduction to BIM, embedded below from YouTube.com...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPaja7mLiTE

Pictures from Prague

Tomorrow I am speaking at the Czech BIM Council's conference in Prague.

I found time to time to take one or two pictures on the way down to the city centre to watch the England Euro 2012 match...

Cathedral and castle

Guards

Beautiful cathedral

Chap slaying a dragon

The view from the hill

Czech TV Tower

Busker alley down from the cathedral

The bridge with the statues on

Over the centuries people have touched this scene for luck - makes it more shiny - Charles Bridge

How RIBACPD.com was developed

Occasionally, it's nice to look back on a project once it has gone live. To see similar posts check out the "Behind the scenes" label for this blog.

Earlier this year the new RIBACPD.com site went live. Below is a bit of background to how we went from requirements through to the finished product. Those readers of this blog from the construction industry will probably see some big parallels between software development and construction.
(and as always with these things - the hard work was not done by me - well done Chris and Chris and John the main designer, developer and QA-er behind this project).

Fig 1 below shows the main requirements document. This forms part of the project plan after a business case has been agreed. Requirements are testable - you cannot have a requirement if you cannot verify it has been met. Each requirement is categorised as "Must be done", "Should be done", "Could be done" or "Won't be done". The volume of comments and track changes in the document below clearly show what an important process this is.

Fig 1 - A well commented fourteen page requirements document is where it all really starts 

Fig 2 below shows an example of a concept design sketch for the homepage. By designing on paper or a whiteboard it is possible to get broad agreement prior to investing time in more detailed designs. This blog is a promoter of "digital is best" 99% of the time. But sometimes it is best starting out with pen and paper.

Fig 2 - Example concept sketch design on paper for the home page

Fig 3 shows that the designs then need worked up to the stage where a software application can be developed from. This tends to be a mix of Fireworks and HTML mock-ups which get passed over the fence from design to development. By breaking the developments down into stages (homepage, search returns, manufacturer page, shortlist etc...) then developments can happen on certain stages before designs have started on others. This can be thought of as Staged Delivery software development methodology - somewhere between traditional waterfall and the more radical agile methods. This gives efficiency in workflow but also greater certainty in terms of delivering requirements.

Fig 3 - A detailed design document then gets down to the nitty gritty of how things work  on each page

And then Fig 4 shows the actual RIBACPD.com site as it was built...

Fig 4 - And then through some clever software development the final site pops out

Fig 5 and Fig 6 show this process again for the basket/shortlist area of the site...

Fig 5 - Another example of concept designs - this time for the "basket"

Fig 6 - And the finished product - note that the "basket" changed to "shortlist"

And finally throughout this process requirements, designs and software are put to our Advisory Panel, Beta Testers and other user groups for their feedback. The picture below shows QA Manager Clair Hillier and Head of Specification Ian Chapman hosting a break-out group from our Advisory Panel.

User feedback

Lego Land - UK Buildings

Some of the buildings at Lego Land where pretty cool too. Mix of lego buildings and the Star Wars exhibition definitely appealed to my geek side. Click a picture for slide show...

St Paul's and Big Ben

City Hall and London Eye

Token Northern structure

Buckingham Palace, not quite the same without Robbie Williams and Jessie J singing on stage in front

Canary Wharf and St. Mary Axe (Gherkin)

Mini-trees

Lego Land - Star Wars

Update 07/05/2013 - Scroll to bottom for more pictures from Star Wars Weekend 2013

Some pictures below from the Lego Land Windsor Star Wars exhibition. Click on a picture for the full-size slideshow.

Naboo N1 Starfighter

Jar Jar and his friends prepare for a dust up

When executions go wrong - Petranaki arena style

R2D2 and C3P0

Cantina Band

Dead AT-AT - suspect a wheeled design would have been more robust than four legs

Speeder biker

Big kid

Millenium Falcon

By all accounts a state-of-the-art modern specification system was used to specify "the Falcon"

The Gamorrean guard gets a kiss

Obi-Wan Kenobi and friends

The pilots march to their Tie Fighters upon hearing the Death Star is under attack

A post-op Palpatine in his dressing gown

On the look out for Luke

Scout Troopers ready to get their Pick N Mix from the Lego Land shop

Punishment for speaking over the allocated time at #BSL2013

And a little key ring from the shop