Engineering Inc. - March/April 2007 - 24

BIM rendering courtesy of Thorton-Tomasetti. The rapid industrywide acceptance also has resulted in several formidable challenges, such as how best to integrate BIM into the day-to-day workflow of an engineering firm and how to address the possible legal concerns that may develop. Three-dimensional modeling allows all disciplines within a firm to capture not only the relevant geometry of a project, but also the materials, costs and scheduling information for their part of the work. Drawings can be extracted from the model and “virtual walkthroughs” allow coordination issues to be identified and resolved long before work begins in the field. Designs also can be updated automatically when, for instance, a structural component is altered. “It’s a much more accessible way of understanding decisions and their implications, leading to better and faster decision making,” says architect Scott Simpson, president and CEO of Cambridge, Mass.–based Stubbins Associates. James Jacobi, president and chief information officer at Walter P. Moore and Associates in Houston, says BIM “dramatically reduces errors and omissions because drawings produced from highly coordinated models mean there are no disconnects between the design and the draw24 ENGINEERING INC. MARCH / APRIL 2007 ings.” And, he adds, the digital model also becomes an invaluable asset for building operation and management personnel once the building is complete. Many industry practitioners believe that most users have yet to realize BIM’s full potential. Making that leap will require cultures and customs to be re-examined, according to Simpson. “BIM forces people to think in an integrated way; the basic issues it presents have more to do with behavior than learning new technologies.” Manhattan-based Thornton-Tomasetti Group has used BIM for about five years. Erleen Hatfield, a vice president with the firm, says it has led to shorter overall schedules, improved communications and better definition of a project’s scope. The firm has used BIM to issue contract documents for steel projects with all the deliverable information included. She adds that Thornton-Tomasetti even uses BIM when clients don’t demand it because it’s faster and drawings are better coordinated. The firm employs approximately the same number of drafters as before BIM, but, thanks to the new technology, is able to do “significantly more work.” The advantages of BIM seem best suited for large, multifaceted projects. But Walter P. Moore’s Jacobi believes that notion will change as users grow more accust o m e d to the system’s many benefits. “We found that when folks went on to smaller projects they didn’t want to go back to the traditional process,” he says. Hatfield agrees that all projects can benefit from BIM, particularly when it is used for structural engineering analysis. But she adds that other engineering disciplines—such as electrical or mechanical—currently are more difficult to model along with the structural analysis as some firms run parallel modeling for electrical and mechanical work. Phil Bernstein, vice president of AEC Industry Strategy and Relations at Autodesk, a leading provider of BIM software, agrees that BIM is transforming the way industry professionals worldwide apply technology to building design, construction and management. “BIM supports the continuous and immediate availability of project design scope, schedule and cost information that is high quality, reliable, integrated and coordinated. The ability to keep this information up to date and accessible in an integrated digital environment gives architects, engineers, builders and owners a clear overall vision of their projects, as well as the ability to make better decisions faster—raising the quality and increasing the profitability of projects.” Challenges Remain Despite BIM’s potential to revolutionize the industry, there still are challenges, with software incompatibility among the most imposing. While BIM centers on the digital model, each discipline contributes to the model by capturing information in a database. And just as WordPerfect could not read early Word documents, database programs do not always work together seam-

Engineering Inc. - March/April 2007

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