European BIM Summit 2016 - Day 1 of 2

Over 400 delegates were present today for the European BIM Summit 2016 at the World Trade Centre Barcelona.

European BIM Summit 2016 - World Trade Centre Barcelona

Autodesk were one of the main sponsors. Their primary 'thought leader' Dominic Thasarathar looked into the future and predicted where he thought technology would take the industry. The youtube clip below covers a lot of the same material - definitely worth a watch...

Miguelangel Gea from Total BIM Consulting was one of many international BIM case studies. The case study shown in the photo below was particularly interesting as it was the story of building an entire holiday complex on a Spanish island. A pretty exciting project by all accounts.

Miguelangel Gea builds an island resort using BIM - wouldn't mind a game of golf there.

The best session of the day for me was the hour with Souheil Soubra from France, Ilka May from Germany and Adam Matthews from the UK. It looked at what levels of Government support existed around Europe for BIM adoption. Adam is chair of the EU BIM Task Group, so it was fascinating to listen to the vision for that initiative. I also managed to persuade Adam to pen an article for the upcoming NBS BIM report - so keep an eye out for that.

Clear LOD guidance and a standardised object library - on the French roadmap

Nice comic strip from German speaker Ilka May

UK BIM Task Group in front of 440 delegates

A lot of waste in construction - this amounts to a huge amount of time and money

If strategies are not aligned across Europe we risk adding cost, not removing it

The EU BIM Task Group Vision

The main guest speaker of the day was the UK's Mark Bew. Mark has been the lead figure in the UK in terms of forming the BIM Task Group and rolling out the strategy. As always, it was fantastic to listen to Mark present and reflect on all of the hard work and great progress that has been made in the UK over recent years.

"To achieve these objectives we cannot just squeeze the current process, we need to change it"

Mark Bew presents UK Level-2 BIM

Rob Garvey was another presenter from the UK - Rob talked about the BIM4 groups and how the BIM Task Group's message is being pushed out by the wider community. But there were also many more BIM stories from around the world. A few photographs from the rest of the day below...

Rob tells Europe about our acronyms :;

Not only do they have Neymar, Suarez and Messi - but they also have a BIM of their stadium

Brian Skripac - tell receivers of the model what it can be relied on for - LODs not just blanket warnings

Brian Skripac presents an LOD matrix

Bilal Succar and Mohammad Kassem show a maturity model that allows different nation's abilities to be compared

The bottom of La Rambla

European BIM Summit 2016 - Pre-Summit Day

I arrived in Barcelona today for the 2nd European Summit on Building Information Modelling. The actual conference starts tomorrow. But a few screengrabs and photos from the speakers dinner below...

• Conference website - europeanbimsummit.com
• Conference hashtag - #BIMSummit16

The conference flyer

The conference agenda

Pyrenees looking spectacular

Remember my local team beating this lot a few years back

Construction Manufacturer Roca's beautiful Barcelona Gallery

Barcelona Gallery

Back drop for the welcome address

Art gallery - exhibition looking at urban swimming

A pretty cool showroom for the latest Roca washroom systems

Please help make the NBS BIM Report 2016 the best yet

A little shout for support from me here if that's OK...

The sixth BIM report is on its way

The sixth NBS BIM Report will be published in the Spring. As always, this is a bit of industry insight that is available for free to all - and we want to make it the biggest and best yet. The report will look at the results of our annual UK BIM suvey and also a selection of insightful articles and opinion pieces.

So the question is, can you help us by passing this request to do the survey around your colleagues and contacts in other organisations? The direct link is below or you can send this blog post around to give a little context.
- http://surveys.ribaenterprises.com/wh/s.asp?k=144777062858

A reminder that all previous reports are available to download for free from our website:
- www.thenbs.com/topics/BIM/reports/

It's good to look back now at the 2011 report when almost half of the industry hadn't even heard of the acronym B.I.M.

It's also good to look back at some of excellent articles we have features over the years from the BIM community.

Insightful articles in addition to the survey analysis

So please..

1. Take part in the survey if you haven't already:
   http://surveys.ribaenterprises.com/wh/s.asp?k=144777062858
2. Encourage those in the industry that you know to take the survey (from the new graduate through to the person about to retire - we want all opinions) - email this blog post around?
3. For those on social media - please send out a tweet or do a short blog post

The more that take part - the more insightful it will be... and you stand of chance of winning £500 too - £250 to spend at John Lewis or £250 to give to your chosen charity. 

Many thanks,

S

European BIM Summit

I'm looking forward to the first big BIM event of 2016 and delighted to be on the bill as one of the speakers.

The European BIM Summit is in Barcelona in February and will attract over 400 delegates with an interest in digitalising the construction industry from around the world.

- http://europeanbimsummit.com/

I'll be speaking on how industry has responded to the UK Government's BIM Strategy and how digital change is happening now in the UK.

It's great to see that the UK is out in force at the event. Other speakers from the UK include Mark Bew the chair of the UK Government's BIM Task Group. Mark has been the leader and the main drive behind UK Government's BIM journey over the last decade.

Another notable speaker from the UK is the BIM Task Group's Adam Matthews who has been EU Development Director. To read more about Adam's activities please see the links below.

- http://www.bimplus.co.uk/news/eu-bim-task-group-plans-convergence-programme/

- http://www.bimtaskgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Adam-Matthews.pdf

Taking the standardised approach to BIM as defined by the Level-2 process wider than just the UK will clearly have benefits for construction professionals and manufacturers that do business internationally. This is certainly a BIM event I am looking forward to - and if anyone is getting a cheap flight out to Barcelona (maybe cheaper than a train ticket to London!) then I look forward to seeing you there.

- http://europeanbimsummit.com/ - Feb 18th and 19th of February

Keep an eye on this blog and my @StephenHamilNBS twitter page for updates from the event.

Follow the event at @BIMSummit on twitter.

Conference flyer

Top five blog posts of 2015

First of all a very merry Christmas to anyone who has visited my blog this year. I hope everyone has a great Christmas break and returns ready to go again in 2016.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all who visit this blog!

I've now been blogging about BIM, technology and all things NBS for over six year - time flies! At the end of each year I look at the web stats to see which of my posts attracted the most web traffic. Now looking back at 2015, in reverse order the top five were...

In 5th place - BIM Management Handbook

- http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-bim-management-handbook.html

In 5th place was a review I wrote looking at the big RIBA Publishing BIM title of the year, David Shepherd's 'BIM Management Handbook'.

It should be noted that my review of BIM for Dummies (Mordue, Swaddle and Philp) was posted slightly later in the year so just missed out on this 5th place spot. But as books are best purchased in pairs you may also want to check that excellent publication out too...
- http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/building-information-modelling-for.html


In 4th place - The NBS BIM Object Standard

- http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/nbs-bim-object-standard-and-shared.html

In February a social media/blogging debate started asking the question whether standards were needed in terms of BIM object creation.

After observing opinion, I put my two pennies worth in arguing that by standardising terminology and promoting international, and national standards, then a greater quality of BIM object is created. We have consistent data on sites like rightmove and autotrader and this allows us to make more informed decisions - so why not for BIM?

The debate started again in September. Below is a follow up post:
- http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/standardised-bim-objects-for-uk.html


In 3rd place - Ecobuild 2015 Review

- http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/ecobuild-2015-bim-what-you-missed.html

In March we were fortunate enough to be chosen by UBM to curate the content for their BIM Theatre at Ecobuild. I think we put on a decent show with well over 100 delegates at each presentation.

The blog post looked back at the three days in East London at one of the construction industry's biggest annual events.

Note - watch this space for news about Ecobuild 2016!


In 2nd place - Updates to the NBS Plug-in for Autodesk Revit

- http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/enhancements-to-nbs-plug-in-for.html
Moving from a document-way-of-working to a digital-way-of-working  has seen real efficiency and accuracy improvements where tools and content work together. The success of our NBS plug-in for Autodesk Revit demonstrates this.

The second most popular post of the year looked at the 2016 enhancements to our plug-in. Link to the specification, view NBS design guidance, check annotations, drag and drop objects into the model, synchronised guidance about the objects... As a free tool it really helps put the information into building information modelling.

Also check out, the recent post below looking at the personalisation enhancements with newly introduced 'My Library'.
- http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/your-nbs-national-bim-library.html


In 1st place - The BIM Toolkit in ten minutes

- http://constructioncode.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/the-bim-toolkit-in-ten-minutes.html
There was also the small matter of the release of the Innovate UK funded BIM Toolkit that was developed as a free-to-use tool for those working to UK Government Level-2 BIM.

NBS led the team that worked through a six-month funding period (and beyond) to develop this. The Toolkit in ten minutes blog post gave an overview to all of the key concepts and gave pointers on where to find out more on all of these in terms of technical articles.

So whether you are an client wanting to know more about employer's information requirements, or a design manager wanting to know about LOD or a manufacturer wanting to structure your digital product information - the BIM Toolkit is a great free resource for industry.

So that's it for another year - back in 2016!

Your NBS National BIM Library

This week we released a new feature on NBS National BIM Library called My Library.

Those that have signed into the library will notice that they have a personalised homepage. There are three main areas:

1. The objects you have 'starred' - these are potentially the objects you use most often or the objects you have flagged to download at a later date;
2. The objects you have previously downloaded that have since been updated; and
3. A list of all the objects you have ever downloaded.

A personalised homepage

The starred objects are presented in a data grid so the objects can be easily downloaded, sorted or filtered. The screenshot below shows that the objects have been sorted so that they are grouped by the same category.

The screenshot below shows the Downloaded tab. In this screenshot the user has filtered the list of objects to show those relevant to the search term 'sanit...'.

Your download history

The starred and downloaded objects are a filter option for when you search. In the screenshots below the user quickly filters 681 objects relevant to insulation down to just the 5 relevant items that have been starred.

New search filters

Quickly find the objects you need

The NBS National BIM Library is not just a website for a desktop computer. The user experience is also optimised for mobile or tablet. It's now easy to 'star' an item when you are on your mobile (maybe on a train or at home on an evening).

Fully responsive

Items that you have starred are accessible from whichever device you are using. For example, you could star an item on your mobile and then access this from the webbrowser on your desktop the next day. Another workflow example could be if you are using the NBS Plug-in for Autodesk Revit. The screenshots below show the National BIM Library website being accessed from inside the design tool. Your favourite objects can be found quickly and then added to your model through simply dragging and dropping.

Welcome screen in our plug-in

Accessing your frequently used objects

Dragging and dropping straight into your design

For more information please see:

• www.nationalbimlibrary.com/What-is-My-Library 
• www.nationalbimlibrary.com/nbs-plug-in-for-autodesk-revit 

The new NBS website

Our new NBS website is now live at the beta web address http://new.thenbs.com/ 

The home page is clean, crisp, easy to navigate and is designed for web and mobile. The overall design and use of the new NBS brand hopefully adds to a great user experience.

Our new website

There are three main sections to the website Services, Knowledge and Support. Within the Services section you can quickly find the right NBS products and tools for your practice. Whether you work in the architecture or engineering - whether you work on small or large projects.

NBS products and tools that can benefit you

The Knowledge area has a wide range of interesting articles. Each article is tagged by the relevant topics and also the author. By clicking on the topic or the author you can discover more articles of a similar nature.

A wide range of interesting articles in the Knowledge section

The third main area of the site is the Support area. If you are an NBS user (or want to browse the support that NBS users are provided with) you can look through the online help articles and videos - equally you can find out about training options and also engaging in our customer panels.

Get the most out of our services in the Support section

One final mention is the new 'My NBS' area of the site. If you have an NBS Account (from using NBS Create or NBS Domestic or National BIM Library or BIM Toolkit...) then you simply sign into the site and you can save useful articles, look at your history or tailor your experience and notifications based on your interests.

The new 'My NBS' section of the website

So please spend a little bit of time looking through the website and any feedback you send through our 'BETA bar' is most appreciated:
- http://new.thenbs.com/