Bim Case - Traditional Communication Path in Construction

Introduction

My Company is dealing in construction business. Its turnover is around $20 million annually with a total company staff around 50 personnel. There are on about 10 to 15 projects running concurrently at one time.

It is becoming more and more important for our company to share data from the design and construction phases of a project with facility operators and managers.

In fact, sharing data in general is an important trend in the construction marketplace, helping to streamline workflow throughout the entire lifecycle of a project.

The Challenge

Traditionally, the various team members have used post and fax to send paper-based drawings and other documents to each other. Physical documents, drawings and correspondence, with all their attendant amendments, many out-of-date before they reached recipients by conventional means of delivery, remained the main communication media.

During even very modest projects, project teams created, copied, distributed and stored huge volumes of information. Production and exchange of data was slow and labour-intensive, and there was considerable duplication. Team communications on the vast majority of construction projects were still achieved through traditional means: face-to-face meetings, telephone calls and paper-based communications between individual team members. Until recently, information technology has done little to reduce this mountain of paper (the key industry tendency was almost always to turn the end product back into paper).

Traditional Communication Path In Construction

Sharing accurate, timely information is critical for construction team members. Wasted time and cost can almost always be traced back to poor co-ordination caused by late, inaccurate, inadequate or inconsistent information - sometimes a combination of all four. Moreover, conventional construction industry IT applications do little to improve matters, mainly being designed as stand-alone tools with little integration between them. Clients and project teams need a way to communicate, centralise and share information more quickly and efficiently, while building up a data bank that can be re-used in future.

The Solution

Instead of linear communications and separate ‘islands' of information, our company uses construction collaboration technologies (Aconex) which offer a more efficient and less complex way to manage communications. At their heart is a single, shared environment accessible to all authorised team members.

Moreover, they do not require team members to have sophisticated IT systems or to all use the same software applications. Broadly, all such systems can be accessed from a normal computer equipped with a standard computer browser (eg: Microsoft