What Do You Really Know… Really Know About BIM Workflows?
What is the biggest worry or fear you have about your current company, or job, or workforce? Is it fear of failure? Is it the press of time against meeting your goals and the lurking concern that you’re not getting where you think you need to be, in order to be successful as a business…a manager…an employee? And how do you judge how well you’re really doing... does the work you do now stand the test of time? Is it recognized as industry leading or are you relegating yourself to the middle of the road, based on a lack of interest in anything that initiates change?
Is This You?
I’ve recently read some great articles about the evolution of CAD applications, BIM, and seeing the history of Autodesk and its role in the evolution of computer-aided design and beyond. I keep stopping and remembering that what we do… what we’ve accomplished in terms of the tools we used and the design technology that’s available has happened in the span of a single generation. The design tools have changed the way that we not only look at the art of architecture, but also the overall impact on our lives, our culture, and our worldview. It has expanded our view of the building itself, as well as our understanding about our approach to “building” as the construction process.
In the past nine years, I’ve been graced with the opportunity to support and lead an effort to implement BIM workflows and tools from Autodesk. We’ve grown with the evolution of Revit®, AutoCAD®, and vertical applications into industry-leading tools that improve productivity, boost accuracy, and increase coordination. There have been good days, “Aha” moments, and dark days where the fights never seem to end. It’s all part of the experience, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.
As a client now, as opposed to the reseller channel, it’s quite different than being on the selling end after 13 years. The critical part of the client-Autodesk relationship is that they are more committed to a two-way success, as we seek to gain more successful outcomes on our projects. It’s a partnership that other software resellers really take for granted and they have no clue how important this aspect is.
As a part of this process, we recently held some in-house meetings with key Autodesk personnel. The topic revolved around the BIM workflow and its impact on linear design (or as we called it, horizontal design). And it was both enlightening and terrifying. We’re not as good at the BIM workflow as we would like to think we are. So this article is about figuring out why, and how we get to where we need to be.
Understanding the Definition of BIM
There have been many misconceptions about what BIM is. What it is not, is software. Building Information Modeling is a workflow. It’s a combination of three key items that occur during the design process. Starting with Building, this is not related to a specific structure, but the word actually as a verb—the action or creation of a building or structure. This includes a wide variety of construction types—retail, commercial, and industrial facilities. But it also includes dams, treatment plants, stations, and much more.
Information associated with the components created during the act of building something is where BIM differs from traditional CAD tools. The data associated with the components is not static, but interactive. As the design progresses, the information is constantly available and can be edited at any time. The data could be related to physical properties, such as the diameter of a pipe, the height of a wall, or the size of a beam. But as the design alters these components, the information can be updated in real time. Traditional CAD requires manual geometry, text and dimension editing, which adds steps to the process.
Modeling is the one part of the BIM process that’s actually consistent. In the past (and even today) architects and designers would build actual physical models from cardboard, plaster, and any materials that could be used to help visualize the design. 3D is not a new concept, but in the early days of AutoCAD, it required a lot of system horsepower that was either too costly to implement, or too slow to use effectively.
Gradually, the AutoCAD and Autodesk platform of 3D modeling tools has expanded, becoming easier to use and even an expected part of the design process. It has become a simple matter of extracting from someone’s head the idea of what the structure should be and converting it into a virtual world that is easier for even the most novice users to navigate and understand.
Where Tools and Workflow Mix
This is where we get into trouble as an industry. The biggest excuse I continue to hear is that “our clients only want AutoCAD and 2D, so that’s all we’re going to do.” This displays an incredible misunderstanding of how today’s design tools work, and the automation they bring to the design workflows. Examples of how the tools and workflows are combined to automate and improve the design process involve model views, data harvesting, and coordination.
In schematic design, there are early diagrams that are developed for electrical schematics, process flow diagrams, plumbing risers, and more. Autodesk has been investigating how these different drawings can interact with the models themselves, but Revit already includes detail and annotation families that mimic traditional CAD dynamic blocks. By improving the drafting process, you reduce the excessive man-hours needed to complete each as individual drawings. And who knows… maybe one day we can link that diagram to the Revit model in a much more meaningful way.
Add this to today’s tools for capturing existing conditions with drones, photogrammetry, VR/AR, GIS, and mapping technologies, and we have a far better understanding and visualization of our built environment. These tools also reduce the environmental impact of the traditional means needed to research, measure, and quantify existing conditions with less personal intensive activities, making it safer to gain that overall view.
But the workflow advantages from scanning to drafting go far beyond the typical CAD project. As model derivatives, the plan, section, and elevation views are automatically created and updated as the model is changed. View templates provide a consistent look and feel to the documents, allowing for multiple views to be updated at once. This alone counts for the majority of productivity improvements over the traditional CAD process.
And as the project progresses towards the initial goal of getting the building constructed, tools such as BIM 360 change how we communicate in the simplest fashion. By including the owner in the BIM 360™ project, they can gain a clearer picture of what’s happening in real time. The need to hold biweekly onsite meetings can be supplanted by leveraging the publishing and mark up features…from your phone...from your phone!!! Imagine that—and we all used to sit on those things for hours saying, “you hang up… no, you hang up first…”.
The hardest part for traditional managers, designers, and engineers is taking that risk—that step away from your comfort zone—and taking the time to learn on your own how much things have changed. We tend to abdicate our own personal responsibility of growth in lieu of the safe space. But those who venture out to learn new ways and tools are almost always rewarded, when the appropriate level of effort is applied.
Moving Past Design
The building design is complete. PDF, DWG, and RVT models (along with Excel, Word, and several legal documents absolving yourselves of any legal liability or guilt associated with the things you missed) are delivered to the client. The biggest hole in the BIM workflow happens at this very point, and it revolves around the client’s understanding of what BIM is and should be.
We’ve done wonders designing art in architecture, creating energy efficient structures in ways we never imagined, but abdicated our largest responsibility—educating our clients. The end users of what we do in most cases typically understand the engineering and constructability of the designs, but have little to no understanding of how we got there. The urges to protect intellectual property typically outweigh the risk taken by making your client not a client but a partner. We find it difficult to open up our design process, especially when great effort is made to gain a competitive advantage in a world of dwindling resources and budgets.
BIM in its very nature is based on trust—a collaborative process where the best gains are made by sharing information and responsibility equally. It’s easy in tools such as BIM 360 to create rules to protect what needs to be protected, but that shouldn’t stop or hinder the flow of information. In fact, it should celebrate it. Bringing the data and criteria into the process helps provide a more consistent outcome and allows changes to occur sooner, where the financial impact is lessened.
As the owner, their responsibility now changes. It’s no longer going to be enough to take the DWGs and store them somewhere in a network drive that gets lost to memory. The “Sheet on a Stick” history (yes, that’s an old drafter joke) becomes a dusty relic of days gone past—and yet you still see this in facilities around the country as the main source of information regarding their most valuable physical asset.
The owner has an equal responsibility to learn and own the building, information, and model combined. It’s not that this doesn’t happen. The asset management and database industry has made many developers rich. It’s the lack of consistency in the deliverable that causes the stoppage. So how does the owner fix this? By developing their standards to meet today’s BIM workflows instead of yesterday’s hard copies. By acquiring the same tools that update, maintain, and manage the model and its inherent advantages. Subscription licensing was key for this step to make it easier for the owners to take. You buy what you need, when you need it, and for as long as you need it. The notion of owning the hammer is long extinct in the world of the nail gun… or 3D printing… or robotic construction based on generative design.
Understanding Project Information Modeling
As I started to sit down and write this last section, some old cobwebs cleared out. I had been racking my brain about PIM… then remembered I had written an article on October 19, 2009—almost 10 years to the day I really started writing this article. Here’s the link if you want to check it out:
https://mep-cad.blogspot.com/2009/10/pimmin-design-world.html
To me, PIMM stood for Process Information Modeling and Management and was, in my opinion, a better understanding of what BIM could and should be. In our recent meetings with Autodesk, the topic of linear (or horizontal) design was the main topic of conversation. And then Autodesk produced this image (Figure 3) that explains the same idea in a much more comprehensive fashion.
So, where does this lead us? For years, all these tools—GIS, reality capture, and BIM—were competing technologies. Add the evolution of the Internet into the monster it is today, and all the information and workflows needed for complete design have changed. We now must be able to step back and look at how all of this—from the tools, to the data, to the physical representation of the act of building—takes new form. The ability to harvest these vast amounts of information and assimilate it into something that makes sense now requires a completely different approach.
That’s why PIMM comes back to me as what BIM really is—the process of understanding the project information, managing the model, and capitalizing on its inherent benefits are what can really change design for the better. The evolution of BIM 360 and the Forge platform from Autodesk as a workflow to PIM is where we want to be. It’s critical to make sure we, as an industry, don’t fall back to the same old habits and excuses, but instead lead the way to better designs through modern technology. Project Information Modeling is, in fact, the natural extension and result of understanding what the BIM workflow is all about.
If you find yourself believing your only responsibility is delivering what you think your client still wants as 2D… do you still believe this? With the state of the current technology, where do you think you should be? How much do you really know… really know… about the BIM workflow?
Think about it.
David Butts is the Engineering Technology Manager for Gannett Fleming, an Autodesk Expert Elite program member and subject matter expert for BIM technology. Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, David has more than 34 years of BIM/CAD management, design, training, and consulting experience. His product specialties include Autodesk Revit, AutoCAD, Plant 3D and other AEC tools. As a speaker and mentor at Autodesk University for the last 16 years, David has won three Top Speaker awards (2011/2016). Prior to Gannett Fleming, he was a training manager for an Autodesk reseller as well as architectural and engineering designer for other design firms, with broad industry experience.
