Lean Construction and BIM, and HOK's 2nd Annual BIM Award

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.)

Thank you for your continued interest.

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > January 2012