Open BIM FAQ: What are AEC projects’ key collaboration issues?

Even at the smallest scale – AEC projects are endeavors charged with serious collaboration challenges. Successfully completed building projects are the result of the collaboration of different teams of building professionals such as architects, different types of engineers and a network of the general contractor and subcontractors. These teams more often than not have divergent “trade” priorities and belong to independent organizations with counter-pointing interests.

Due to the above these are collaboration issues present in most AEC projects:

• Lack of real coordination workflow → parties in effect don’t coordinate their work only share documentation in progress to show design intent
• Lost information during data conversion → native data needs to be converted to open in the other parties’ environment for coordination
• Interpretation issues of data from other party → data only becomes real information when there is an established workflow for interpretation
• Limited utilization of building data created by others → design information created by one trade cannot be integrated into other trades’ environment
• Missing follow-up of design changes between the trades → coordination is not a one-time data exchange but a continuous bidirectional process
• Lack of overall coordination environment for multiple trades → coordination ideally includes all related activities such as collision detection, quantity takeoffs and constructability issues
• Lack of detailed model for construction → late coordination and spent time to produce 2D drawings forces construction to be done on sketches/not-up to date plans

Related articles

• Open BIM FAQ: What are AEC projects’ key collaboration issues? (archicadsa.wordpress.com)
• Open BIM Program (archicadsa.wordpress.com)
• BIM – Productivity with a capitol “B” (bimblogsa.wordpress.com)
• Akos Pfemeter talks Open BIM to Architosh (www.architosh.com)
• unlock the power of collaboration with Open BIM (www.archdaily.com)