Lean Construction and BIM, HOK's 2nd Annual BIM Awards, and Macro BIM

Happy New Year! Hope you had a fun and festive holiday season and 2012 is off to a good start for you. AECbytes starts off this month with a Viewpoint article by David Haynes, Director of Consulting at Ideate Inc. At the inaugural US Revit Technology Conference last summer (see http://www.aecbytes.com/feature/2011/RTC2011_US.html), I attended a very interesting session by David Haynes on how lean processes in the manufacturing world could be translated in the AEC industry through BIM. In this article, he shares more details about the Lean Business practices that have been adopted in many industries and the best practices that A/E firms can adopt and utilize in their own work.

We will also take a look at the projects selected as the finalists in HOK's 2nd Annual BIM Awards competition. This is an internal competition to evaluate and award projects within HOK that have exhibited exemplary use of BIM technology in one of four major categories; Design, Delivery, Collaboration, and Visualization. I was invited to serve on the jury of the competition and therefore had the opportunity to review all the finalist's presentations and get an understanding of their projects. The winners were annouced at a special ceremony at Autodesk University on November 28. (Recall that AECbytes published two articles on Autodesk University 2011 last month: the highlights of the general session keynote and the innovation forums I was able to attend, and the highlights of the Exhibit Hall from an AEC perspective.)

And finally, we will look at how Sundt Construction has improved its pre-construction experience with the use of Macro BIM technology. Delivering a project on time and on budget starts by aligning the assumptions between the owner and the contractor early in the life of the project. The opportunity to maximize the value of a building is greatest during the earliest stages of planning. That’s when the decisions that drive costs are made. Sundt Construction has closed the owner-contractor assumption gap by leveraging macro BIM technology integrated with its own historical cost data. Armed with this one-two technology punch, the firm can more effectively communicate cost with speed and predictability.

Lachmi Khemlani, Ph.D.
Founder and Editor, AECbytes

January 2012