Construction World September 2016

PROJECTS AND CONTRACTS

PUSH BOUNDARIES across disciplines Wilhelm du Plessis spoke to Nicholas Karassavas, Arup’s CAD and BIM manager. He has an architectural and strong multidiscipline technical background and speaks with authority about BIM in the South African and global context.

widely used is because of the cost. How expensive is designing a building with this? It’s difficult to put an exact cost on using BIM – it depends on a wide variety of factors including the level of BIM required, the complexity of the project and the maturity of the BIM team involved. This cost also needs to be considered in conjunction with the value using BIM provides. Significant lifecycle cost saving opportunities are unlocked because we are able to visually represent additional information like time, cost, design specifica- tions, sustainability and maintenance infor- mation – remaining pertinent for the life of the building. This ability is showing substantial savings throughout the process from design through to facilities management, ultimately improving design, performance and reducing risk throughout the construction and finance management aspects of the project. Can the system be applied to any building? As long as the architects and engineers are on board, a level of BIM can be used on any project. A less complicated building simply needs less data and has fewer deliverables and requirements than a larger and more costly building. Buildings with repetition, such as franchise offerings (banks, food franchisers, hospitals, store franchisers etc.), have the most to gain from using high level BIM. This is because the repeat business warrants more effort be put in earlier to the systems and integration of aspects such as costs, specifications, manufacturer codes, lighting, finishes, construction and procurement sequencing on these projects, etc. What are the advantages of BIM for ‘green building’? BIM excels in green build. The high end technical CAD tools used in BIM have abilities to geo-reference the project and model accurate live weather and thermal data to libraries of materials and content used within projects. This allows for optimal building orienta- tion, better reports, accurate design checks, including how the design impacts carbon energy loads, lighting and active or passive heating and cooling solutions. For the outcomes of good green building design, it is essential that all the designers get involved early (before the concept designs are completed) so that each specialist designer may add his/her portion

In a nutshell, what is BIM? Building Information Modelling (BIM) is an information-centric process of collating and managing pre-defined outcomes in the form of digital data that gets accumulated during the different stages of a building’s lifecycle by all the professionals involved – from initial planning to facilities management to de-commissioning. Various software applications and processes are used to create an intelligent, shared, digital 3D model that is used to represent this data. How has the support for it been in South Africa? South Africa has a strong existing and rapidly growing set of professionals, both capable and willing to share their knowledge to an eager architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. We have workshops, talks and forums at all major build and AEC events, and a newly formed BIM Institute, which is leveraging knowledge from leaders in the industry and assisting the industry drive to BIM. There are freely available international protocols and documents covering all aspects of the BIM process for each discipline and player involved.

What are the difficulties with introducing BIM into South Africa?

Initially BIM has been used and managed by the design professionals (architects and engi- neers) who benefit directly. It is doing well in South Africa and the number of firms with BIM capacity is growing at a healthy pace. However, many owners and property managers currently are unaware of the potential gains from the BIM process. For example, if an owner used a BIM model to keep a live record of asset manage- ment data and then wanted to move offices, they could use the model to move any associ- ated element on a virtual plan. Owners need to start questioning what can be delivered by professional teams on their projects beyond the traditional drawings. We also need the adoption of a common SA BIM standard, based on international standards, to aid our AEC sector in its ability to better share, create and manage all this data and related documentation in a commonly accepted manner. How is this system applied to your work within Arup? Arup is an international design, engineering and business consulting firm working on many of the most innovative and complex planning, building, infrastructure, transport and civil engineering projects in the world. We have an ethos of testing new technologies – these may cost us, but the lessons learnt outweigh pure profits. Embracing learning and innovation leads to the pushing of boundaries. When we saw how BIM makes our internal systems more efficient, has the ability to reduce risk and construction issues and helps us push new boundaries across our disciplines, it made sense to adopt BIM as our default method- ology for producing design work. Various governments and organisations that Arup works with, specify BIM on their projects. This cemented our commit- ment to this way of working and under- standing projects. One of the reasons why the BIM system has not been more

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Nicholas Karassavas, Arup’s CAD and BIM manager.

CONSTRUCTION WORLD SEPTEMBER 2016