BIM coordination

The most expensive clashes are the ones that surface on site. A pipe runs exactly where the structural drawing shows a brace, and the decision has to be made within the hour, next to a crane that is standing still and costing money.

Working on a shared model moves those decisions back to the design stage, when a change costs hours of work rather than weeks of downtime. We model the structure in a BIM environment, coordinate it with the other disciplines and – wherever the project touches an existing facility – start from a survey of the actual condition rather than from archive drawings.

One shared model, constant insight

A BIM model is not a prettier drawing. It is a database in which every element carries its own parameters, and a change to one of them passes through schedules and drawings without being retyped. Design teams work from a single source, so the question “which version is current” stops making sense.

For the investor this means constant insight into a three-dimensional picture of the facility, even while the structure is still at concept stage. For the contractor – documentation in which elements do not rule one another out.

Cross-discipline coordination

The structure is rarely the problem in itself. The problem tends to be where it meets services, process equipment and architecture – particularly in industrial facilities, where the density of services is high and routes are run wherever there happens to be room.

Clash detection on the model allows those encounters to be settled at the desk. We work in Revit, Advance Steel and Tekla, sharing resources in a cloud environment and through Revit Server, so that everyone involved in the process has access to the current model – not only the person who has it on their own drive.

Laser scanning instead of guesswork

For modernisations and extensions we use 3D laser scanning and photogrammetry. A point cloud gives the geometry of the facility as it is today – including erection tolerances, alterations made over the years and services that appear on no drawing at all.

For a support platform carrying a production line for Maier S. Coop, Laser Scan made it possible to reproduce the geometry of the existing facility faithfully before designing a structure 84 m long, erected in Poligono in Spain. At the extension of the Sempertrans plant we used the same method to survey the facility, and for Pratt & Whitney – a detailed survey of the electroplating line together with a structural strength analysis of the main structural members.

Projects delivered entirely in BIM

The Mercedes-Benz electric battery plant in Jawor – 44,000 m² of floor area and 2,600 t of steel – was delivered by us entirely in BIM, with bilingual documentation. At that scale coordination stops being a convenience and becomes the condition for the documentation closing at all.

We coordinate in four areas:

• Cross-discipline coordination in a BIM environment
• Structural modelling in Revit, Advance Steel and Tekla
• Point clouds and photogrammetry (Laser Scan)
• Revit Server and cloud-based resource sharing