How buildingSMART?

Today, maintaining leadership and quality of service in the construction industry is underpinned by the capacity to manage information. Building performance and predictability of outcomes are greatly improved by adopting Building Information Models (BIM) and sharing this rich data with the open protocol IFC.

Governments are increasingly taking up the advantage of BIM; using it to support automated code checking, ensuring buildings meet environmental and energy performance requirements, ensuring asset and management information is available at all tiers of government for operational, maintenance, fiscal and strategic planning.

The global construction software industry is well advanced in the change to BIM.

All the major vendors Graphisoft ArchiCAD, Nemetscheck Allplan and Bentley Triforma have IFC certification, and now with Autodesk Revit’s commitment to IFC compliance there is clear support as many national government agencies start to mandate BIM+IFC.

Many other specialist discipline software in the building engineering, costing, analysis, FM and GIS for example complement these building model editors.

There is no reason today why you cannot exploit these new opportunities.

Below we provide more detailed information by which your organisation can prepare itself for the adoption of object model based construction services. Also review the Projects section which describes work already successfully carried out, and will give you ideas and process examples to adapt to your organisations and projects.

Successfully undertaking the transition involves these tasks:

• understanding the concept of BIM, in effect rethinking about an integrated 3D represenatation - a model - of the project building, rather than today’s use of 2D drawings.
• adopting the new processes involved in sharing information with your clients, partners etc. As an alternative to drawings (which will clearly be an important requirement of many activities in the design, construct and manage cycle), we now share models - for example a HVAC services sub-model.
• acquiring new skills and procedures in your organisation, necessary to “build“ good models, to support information in more explicit ways. Models need managing and automation of documention from a model is now possible.
• defining new legal and working frameworks through particpation in  forums of industry and government, to establish new commercial relationships, acquisition of building product data, etc.

Increasing urbanisation is providing new challenges for local and state governments; BIM coupled with IFC enabled GIS data provides new innovative solutions for urban and regional planning.

Get started today!