Key Traits of an Effective Architectural BIM Support Partnership

In the building design and construction industry, construction documentation forms an important phase between design development and on-site construction administration. In scenarios where architectural practices decide to transition to object-oriented BIM modelling or there is a need to turn around more projects than can be executed by the internal team, firms decide to look for experienced architectural BIM modelling support partners. Whilst such collaboration models provide cost-effective and high-quality access to CAD and BIM expertise, issues can crop up if your support partner does not have appropriate processes and quality standards in place.

As a result, to make the BIM outsourcing engagement work successfully for your architectural practice, there is a need to ensure that the following are in place:

A Dedicated Point of Contact:

A dedicated point of contact in the form of a project manager serves as an integral link between your firm and the outsourcing partner. He/she liaises with the architectural firm’s representative (in most cases the project’s chief architect or the design head) to gather and analyse in detail the project’s requirements, construction specifications, and CAD/BIM standards followed.

Well Defined Project Flow:

After a comprehensive needs analysis by the project manager, a clear process should be in place to break down the client’s 3D architectural modelling and construction documentation requirements into a tangible project scope. The scope then dictates the roles/responsibilities and the turnaround schedules of each of the senior team members, including team leader, senior BIM technicians, senior CAD technicians, BIM coordinators, and draftsmen.

Production Planning Roadmap:

Depending on the resources at hand, the project manager along with team leader should map out a timeline for documentation delivery. Traditional CAD-based processes necessitate clear guidelines pertaining to drawing scales, dimensions, symbols, targets, annotations, and abbreviations. Modern BIM-enabled workflows also require establishment of protocols and standards for master model worksharing, data exchange, library creation, and model coordination.

Multi-Tier Quality Checks:

Rigorous quality check protocols are an integral part of delivering accurate standards-compliant architectural BIM modelling and construction documentation support to architectural practises. The first tier entails draftsmen involved to cross-review their peer’s work followed by an inspection by the team leader on local models. The final tier of quality check phase requires the project manager to undergo a detailed review of the master model. Once the central master model gets a go-ahead from the project manager, it is used to extract construction documents. Finally, the construction documents are reviewed to check whether they fulfil the construction specifications set by the client.

Ability to Coordinate Online with Clients:

The success of your outsourcing partnership will also depend on the associate firm’s ability to hold regular update and doubt-solving virtual sessions. Focussed meetings ensure both you as well as those on the outsourcing team are on the same page as far as the project progress is concerned.

To know about how our architectural BIM modelling and proven BIM/CAD outsourcing model, contact us.

How Residential BIM Modelling Supports Informed Decision-Making?

By and large, building information modelling (BIM) has permeated all major construction sectors, including commercial, residential, and healthcare projects. Nevertheless, the adoption of intelligent 3D parametric model-based design and documentation techniques has been relatively slower in the homebuilding and residential domain than in the commercial realm. Whilst many small and mid-sized architectural practices and residential-focused participants believe the cost and effort of completely shifting to residential BIM modelling outweighs its benefits, other firms view the model-based approach as offering economies of scale only for large projects with higher repetitive designs.

On the other hand, few homebuilding firms and residential owners fall in between the above two ends of the BIM adoption spectrum. These project stakeholders employ a healthy mix of both conventional 2D AutoCAD-based methods and a 3D BIM approach to develop homebuilder construction drawings. Such stakeholders decide whether to go for BIM or not depending on several factors, including the project complexity and the delivery method.

As more and more residential owners and their team participants gain maturity in  using the modern model-based approach to construction documentation, there is an increasing realisation that BIM has a capability to not only bring diverse project stakeholders together in the early project stages but also make construction data more intelligent than before to aid informed decision-making. Depending on the level of details (LODs) used and the scope of the residential project, employing parametric modelling techniques provide several positive value propositions: greater interoperability and cross-discipline communication; early elimination of design/coordination clashes; and accurate cost estimation.

Considering that a master BIM model is an integrated representation of several discipline-specific BIM models: architectural, structural, building services (MEP), and pre-fabrication, amongst others, the communication between multiple parties involved in the project is open and transparent. As a result, the residential design team, the building services team, and the contracting team have a greater ability to discuss, share, and anticipate issues before construction kicks off. Apart from the homebuilder construction drawings extracted from the 3D BIM models, each participant has access to aspects concerning quantity of materials, scheduling, energy performance, and cost/time implications of different design alternatives. This surely makes decision-making more effective and accurate.

Besides streamlining multi-party coordination, employing residential BIM modelling can help the project management team analyse the constructability of a particular design. The smart parametric models allow the team to review design clashes and analyse documents for any missing information that is critical to a project. Consequently, in a few meetings project managers can review the master BIM models and discuss it with all key participants to eliminate design clashes and thoroughly embed construction documents with all the essential information.  Most importantly, all this information is available in the pre-construction stages as opposed to on-site when rectifications can have significant cost overruns.

Additionally, parametric BIM models can considerably improve cost estimation and strategic cost planning compared to conventional AutoCAD-based methods. As these smart models help extract accurate bill of quantities (BOQs) and bill of materials (BOMs), all stakeholders get real-time updates concerning the variance in cost of different design iterations whilst providing greater predictability to owners and investors.

The residential BIM models refine interdisciplinary coordination, provide detailed constructability analysis in the pre-construction stages, and offer accurate project cost estimation as well as helping leverage crucial design and construction data to support intelligent decision-making. So, if your firm operates in the homebuilding industry and is looking for an experienced residential BIM modelling support service to handle all your homebuilder construction drawings, please contact us.