At the EcoBuild Conference in Washington it appeared the laggard construction IT sector is starting to catch up with other industries in terms of leveraging technology to optimize efficiency gains.

A European engineer told me that the fragmented, manual way of managing projects in the U.S. architecture-engineering-construction (AEC) industry is “primitive.”

Yet inroads are being made by a trio of leading building information modeling (BIM) software vendors—Tekla, Graphisoft, Autodesk—with a big push at the university level to makeover education that incorporates real world experience in architecture, engineering, and construction management schools.

When I was in college three decades ago, the civil engineering department had student teams make concrete canoes and drop parachute objects off rooftops. Neither contest had any practical, real world use other than teamwork and sharing ideas. Today, that has changed. And BIM appears to be leading the way.

For too long, the AEC market not only fell behind other industries in terms of utilizing technology, but also other parts of the world, such as Europe, in using software to drive efficiency and improve communication between stakeholders.

BIM is a game changer, especially when placed in cloud datacenter and mobile device ecosystems. Words like transparency, collaboration, and going “paperless” are being batted about. Yet for an industry that’s 80 percent comprised of small-medium businesses, there’s still a long tech road to travel.

University Uprising

California Polytechnic State University, University of Oklahoma (OU), and Auburn University got together to share BIM programs, each with student teams budgeting, scheduling, and modeling a hospital project in their area.

At EcoBuild, the schools gave a panel discussion—“BIM for Virtual Construction: A Collaboration of Three Universities”—on their BIM projects and what the students, mentored by industry professionals, learned and accomplished.

BIM team students. (James O. Grundvig)

The Cal Poly team, led by professor Elbert Speidel, AIA, uses a suite of different software programs—ArchiCad, Tekla, Tekla BIMsight, Artlantis, Onuma Systems and Vico Software—to integrate the project lifecycle. “We have found that this software suite combines the model with the estimate and schedule seamlessly,” he said.

Speidel earned a Bachelor of Architecture at Cal Poly. He worked as an architect for many years. “In 1986 I decided to start a millwork business specializing in hotel and restaurant interiors. This led to my becoming a general and millwork contractor.”

Besides Speidel’s experience as both a designer and builder—the two gatekeepers of any project—Klorman Construction has taken a role at the Cal Poly BIM program.

“They were a big help with supplying plans for the hospital that the students used to model and tie an estimate and schedule to it. Bill Klorman has been very supportive of our BIM curriculum. He and his staff donate their time to come on campus and put the students in training secessions,” the professor said.

What are the students getting out of the new and evolving Cal Poly BIM curriculum?

“A complete construction model with cost estimate, project schedule, conflict detection with analysis, and site logistics. The added requirement by the owner of an as-built model for facility management involves adding the data specific for operations and maintenance,” Speidel explained. Input from professionals has been great for both the students and programs.

The Two-Way Benefits

Tammy L. McCuen, LEED AP and professor at OU’s College of Architecture, Construction Science Division, discussed the benefits and challenges of BIM programs at OU and other universities around the country. After the inter-university panel discussion, she explained the benefits for the students as getting an education with practical experience in industry best practices.

“Since BIM is a new paradigm for construction, several former students are leading new BIM divisions at general contractors, some a year or two out of college. That’s because for all the field experience project managers and estimators possess, they have limited experience with BIM.”

In a follow up e-mail, McCuen stated: “The teams were faced with three primary challenges. The first two are related and specific to the communication between team members and the communication (interoperability) between the different software applications.”

She qualified that establishing “process and procedures for communicating between team members” were important for the students. “They needed to develop a more detailed process with a clearly defined protocol. Working in different software applications required the team’s use of IFC format for file sharing.”

One way to overcome the language barrier of using different software for the various tasks and stakeholders on a project is to use Industry Foundation Classes (IFC). To professionals, IFC is a data model developed by the IAI (International Alliance for Interoperability) to make possible the interoperability in the AEC industry.

McCuen concluded that even by using the IFC model, coordination of team tasks and drilling down to the level of detail on a project were at times difficult to achieve.

“An important lesson for students is in assessing the value proposition of BIM in terms of construction knowledge and experience with BIM. A suite of BIM applications proved to be useful on a limited, local level only.”

Next … Challenges Ahead for BIM

Challenges Ahead for BIM

Greg F. Starzyk, assistant professor at Cal Poly, did a follow-up discussion on the inter-university team panel titled, “Orchestrating the Knowledge Suite.”

He explained the use of “organizational behavior” of the student teams was critical to achieving project success. He and the faculty staff took 60 students, divided them into eight partnerships, and combined the two of the partnerships into four joint ventures.

“What we learned were heterogeneous teams outperformed homogeneous teams. We made sure that each 7-8 persons team had one of the five traits in terms of personality:
Analytical, relational, reflective, proactive, and prescriptive,” Starzyk explained.

“We learned quickly the need to accelerate the process,” he said. “So we divided the various global task responsibilities into a series of micro-projects. With a collaborative sense gained at the assignment level for the students, the complex problem (the project), had to have single solution.”

In a follow-up e-mail, Starzyk responded to the challenges facing BIM in the AEC industry. “BIM certainly invites the transformation of the AEC industry. Yet not enough is said about the soft side of BIM: transforming professionals and the AEC industry from an adversarial culture into a collaborative culture. Without a collaboratively transformed culture, BIM will lose its traction.”

That industry warning in today’s jobless recovery, where profit margins have eroded for all stakeholders, reverberates from the inter-university project and its peer-reviewed conference paper: “BIM for Virtual Construction: A Collaboration of Three Universities” (written by T. McCuen, E. Speidel, and Junshan Liu).

“The instructors hope this project and team assignment will influence other universities to incorporate similar exercises into their curriculum. The instructors’ mission were to provide a learning experience for students and a demonstration project for industry as a means to highlight areas that need improvement if BIM is to be widely adopted within the AEC industry.”

Trust between the stakeholders will be as important as the advances made by BIM and other software over the next few years.

James O. Grundvig is a writer based in New York City.