The requirements for working from home (where possible) and of social distancing when at work (and other times) are now part of our accepted routine. We are becoming used to working remotely and collaboratively, and the use of technology is impacting our lives now, more than ever.

How can BIM be utilised to help ensure these needs are met?

One of the fundamental benefits of BIM is that it encourages working and design collaboration between various design consultants. This helps to streamline and coordinate communication and collaboration between teams, which is obviously needed in the present circumstances where experiences gained by one set of design consultants needs to be shared with other sets of design consultants – whether this is locally or internationally.

BIM facilitates coordination of the various design consultants’ designs, and this helps prevent conflict between those designs, speeding up the design process.

The design consultants collaborate through a central depository of models and drawings, that depository being called a Common Data Environment (CDE), which is normally ‘cloud’ based and can therefore be accessed from anywhere around the world. The use of a CDE therefore enables and encourages remote working from collaborative teams. BIM helps to create healthy buildings, by using computer driven fluid dynamics to assess indoor air quality, by performing analysis of discrete zones to assess the thermal comfort of individual occupants, by examining the feasibility and performance of different ventilation strategies, by managing moisture and condensation, by assessing reverberation and acoustic impacts, and by measuring and designing ambient lighting. Further, BIM provides the ability to use information in the 3D model to directly create fabrication drawings, thus avoiding what can often be a problematic and time-consuming step in the construction process. This creates the opportunity for more prefabrication of components off-site, which, given the social distancing restrictions of working on site, will speed up the entire process of creating both permanent and temporary buildings that are presently so necessary to satisfy the increasing demand during the current pandemic.

Dortek has over 21 different product categories available for download. All our objects are available in user friendly Revit file format and are Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and COBie compatible. Download Dortek’s BIM objects from the NBS National BIM Library or BIMstore.