BIM transforms a global practice – Building Together with LWK + PARTNERS Metallica Technologies
foreign [Music] our first main problem was that we didn't even know how to produce the 2D drawings well it is really difficult you have to let go of your skills and learn new ones it is really difficult our previous renderings were produced from several perspectives for client viewing so what does the building look like in 3D after Construction time management is difficult I think we've paid our dues in that respect [Music] lwk and part Partners is the first listed architect firm in Hong Kong it was established in 1985 and has grown to more than 1 000 employees they have branches in China southeast Asia and the Middle East Vim technology is becoming more widespread it's a new trend in the global aec industry and lwk and partners also needs to face this challenge of technological transformation as a large-scale architectural firm with history the change is not easy but what led the company to take the plunge into them technology my major role is to manage everything about design starting with the concept design all the way through project completion [Music] my major role is design and project management and since we are now using Bim I also deal with information management my main role is to handle high-rise residential building projects in Hong Kong and also some retail projects with some top side developments in the latest development in the kaitak area my work is concerned with the post-production stage including submitting the work plan to government departments and I do tendering post-production and production drawings about six years ago we saw that Bim was emerging that's a big new trend and increasingly as a requirement for example our competitors like Singapore were already mandating around five to six years ago the projects be submitted in bin and in mainland China they also required Ben models for public projects at the time Hong Kong had not yet adapted bin but it was obviously inevitable in the commercial sector so we invested some resources to investigate if it can work in the Hong Kong environment [Music] we checked whether bin could help us technically whether bin could decrease our workload an allow us to work faster while creating a higher quality project [Music] in our industry the design process has been divided into several phases in the conceptual design phase we use some sort of 3D model software in the second phase for detailed design and drawing production we use 2D CAD software and in the last phase for project management we use a spreadsheet to manage the data so that's how we used to work these three phases were totally separated and not coordinated and the data were not synchronized when our company started to use this software we found that it helps us connect all these data and control the data sources which helps us limit errors down the line also finding the data we need is much faster usually when a project is completed our deliverables consist of some CAD drawings and relevant documents but we can see now that if we transfer to our client is a bit models [Music] which we give the client for their facility Management on their end they can retrieve lots of data such as air conditioned data lighting humidity and other kinds of data which can help them when they do a similar project in the future lwk and partners does recognize the advantages and Industry trends of them but this entailed a big transformation in order to work effectively with them of course during this transformation lwk and partners faced plenty of challenges both inside and outside how did they overcome them and solve them when we first promoted bin to our clients they questioned whether bin is even necessary after all we had been constructing buildings in the conventional way for decades thus we held meetings with many different stakeholders including with developers in the building department of Hong Kong government in fact on the government's side we had many meetings with them to discuss one of the Hong Kong aec industry should really turn to bid how should we do it will the submission formats change and how after these discussions when the clients in the government building department had both accepted bin it was much easier for us to turn back to promote in in our company internally because at first we didn't set up a good workflow or Implement a good Bim standard at that time in fact the whole industry the market didn't have a very good standard either so how did we manage to get our internal colleagues who are from different departments including design and project management to use a common standard when using bin we spent a lot of time building up a system in about 2018 the international bin standard was published which was really helpful to the whole industry this International standard includes Bim workflows and the applications of the standard including the requirements and conditions for data exchange this information helped us in setting up the staging and Technical aspects of data exchange with other Consultants so this was really helpful our project timeline is usually very tight especially when the owners have some special requests we have really limited time for design when we started using bin the whole workflow changed we had to spend much more time and effort at early stages than we were used to accuracy became more important in early stages while project management at the later stages became relatively more relaxed so the main task was to explain very clearly to the owner that we have to do it this way so that they would agree to our schedule and a timeline that worked for them too and that only the stages would be different another thing we shall mention is the project timeline and the master program we needed to totally reset our overall plan and cooperate better with the owner right from the early stages based on the new bit usage and requirements through this process after we had done a lot of different bin projects we gradually developed our own bib standard sometimes we have some good suggestions for the owner so if the owner is not familiar with bit we can advise them on how to take advantage of the spent tool and fix their whole planning process even at the beginning stages when we were just starting to build the model we need that vast information we have to create a library to use in building up the model so as we mentioned the initial stages are work intensive But as time goes by you will definitely feel the benefit if you create your model correctly that model will provide you with a vast amount of information which in the later stages will make your job much easier and faster and quickly produce what you need when we started to promote Bim among our colleagues the biggest difficulty was to explain this clearly to them from an early stage the way we used to work a typical project involved piles of drawings more than 50 to 60 sections 20 to 30 plans and over a hundred detailed drawings to create the full building design so now we explained to our colleagues that just one bit model can finish all these drawings and there are many more benefits like fewer changes to make in the later stages once we explain this to the colleagues they gradually agreed to use it in architectural design and they do find that it's much smoother as a Pioneer in the industry it's no easy task to solve all the problems and forage ahead to implement Bim it is extremely important to choose the right tool to fit the workflow so what did lwk and partners finally choose how did the selection process work um [Music] first experimented with bin but the environment was not ready for it yet we tried it for a while and found that we couldn't integrate the bit of software easily into our daily workflow so we gave up but returning to the question of why we ended up choosing archicad it was because our ultimate purpose was really to make things work rather than just doing it for the sake of doing it so the most important reason is that our staff can carry out their daily work and they are really happy with it so when we compare archicad to other Bim software that we tried its biggest Advantage is in the design process archicad is more design oriented similar to other software we use for designing like Rhino and grasshopper which are very compatible with archicad and they have a direct link so the archicad model shows any changes made in Rhino or grasshopper in fact our Architects especially the younger ones prefer designs that use more freedom in terms of forms and shapes and we discovered that the archicad interface is a good fit with the mentioned free-form modeling softwares so on day one when we started to use archicad we asked our colleagues to try it and it was they who told me and told the management that archicad is good for design and very easy to use the rationale of Bin is a 3D model but all our partners were accustomed to 2D drawings plans elevations sections those 2D drawings are of course different compared to the 3D plans so we put a lot of time and effort and wrapped our brains about how to create 2D drawings from 3D models that still keep the standards of the required 2D drawings we use these drawings to communicate with everyone owners developers and even government departments and contractors this is an approach that they are willing to accept using archicad to create traditional 2D drawings is relatively easy archicad has many layer settings which are exactly the same as the layerings that we were using anyway [Music] come on presentations in the early stages we need to do a lot of presentations that include a full set of conventional plants elevations and sections plus a lot of 3D diagrams and rendering those visualization things sometimes include fly-through animations so if we need to finish a set of drawings in a conventional way and then create those 3D items it's really time consuming it takes too much Manpower foreign time to handle the job archicad can handle 2D drawings 3D masks and renderings all the same time so one of the strongest advantages of archicad is visualization the fact is starting from when we are awarded a project until we have to submit a full presentation and a complete plan for government submissions these may be only two to three months time to do it all and in the meantime there are a lot of presentations visualization tasks and some coordination work at later stages our submissions to the government offices require a lot of MEP and structural data so we have to coordinate with MEP and structural professionals so for this we use a bin platform this makes us more efficient than doing it the conventional way it's because we all have a 3D environment a 3D model to view the details also we can spot and fix errors instantly okay so later on we picked up Ben again and tried to archican archicad has turned out to be a very good platform to manage our projects this is something we never thought of before in each new archicad version we get some improvements to help in building our model or creating schedules in later stages or for the tendering stages which we find really useful with every new version we discover something new it's a nice surprise that every new version of archicad is really working better and better we can feel the non-stop Improvement in progress in every new version things work better or new function may be added so you can further develop your skills [Music] so we discovered that archicad can help us with the workflow at every stage of our job that's why we decided to promote archicad internally at our firm when you work hard you naturally expect to benefit from it after a lot of hard work lwk and partners was finally able to successfully implement the Bim operation mode and how did they benefit from it we have a recent project in the kaitak development area some of the facilities inside include large-scale mechanical and electrical equipment these mechanical and electrical facilities can be up to one story high there are also some columns and beams with sizes calculated in meters it's a very large building it has a different design for each floor and also an education center in fact it absolutely requires bib technology in order to be able to place all the facilities in the same building so when using bin we are able to see what is required for the project at an early stage for example how much space is needed for all the building related operations in a bit software this becomes very obvious already in the early stages so we have this project under construction and we are finding much fewer problems than expected the most impressive thing after adopting bib is when I compare the pain level of these projects to the problems in previous projects that were not using bin Bim has really helped me a lot especially in large-scale commercial complex projects in some large-scale underground structures which are used as parking garages before using bin we needed lots of Manpower and time plus some work by consultants for coordination work and to come up with engineering Solutions in contrast using Bim is a big Advantage with this type of project we can communicate the design more clearly so that even if the owner is not very experienced they can still see the issues and propose a solution [Music] in recent years most of our projects are created in bin and we use archicad for schematic design one of the projects that deeply impresses me is a project at shamshui pool it's a mixed-use development that includes some residential areas this is impressive because this was our first project which used a Bim workflow throughout starting with schematic design through government submissions and tender drawings and this is a completed project this is our first learning project s [Music] all the hiccups mentioned before did come up in this project we've been able to solve all these hiccups so far so this project became our Touchstone [Music] after that we started to apply the process to larger scale projects such as the one in tinshue it's a very large project it has more than 20 types of towers and it also includes residential Villas it also has a large Clubhouse and the construction site is large too we also used bip to design this one [Music] and since our Hong Kong team can't manage the whole workload we gave some of the tasks to our subsidiary our colleagues in Manila and asked them to work together with us and to use the bib platform because we have archicad it allows us to work this way that is different subsidiaries working on the same project on different Towers but the model can be merged together to become a complete model that's how we work if we were not using archicad as our bid platform then in those drawings each power would bring would bring us elevations and sections and its own 3D and renderings and all the towers might not match and couldn't be merged into a single project but we were able to use archicad as a coordinating platform and complete a project that's quite large in scale lwk and partners is transformation of Bim has achieved results been widely recognized by the industry the success they achieve in using Bim is not limited to particular project results their use of Bim also has an ongoing positive impact on partners and stakeholders in the whole industry so how does their success with Bim act as a catalyst for the whole industry after lwk and partners completed several successful projects in Bim we received many invitations from consultants and owners who needed Our advice at that time I personally had just finished my first bid project and I received of invitations too the other consultants and owners were very interested in why we liked using Bim so much and how Bim can help them get good results after sharing our experiences we continue to provide suggestions about the bism revolution we help them develop their own bid standards and bid project requirements and how to promote the use of bin for a particular a project that's really a lot [Music] at the beginning when we started using bib we didn't set out to be just users but also bit promoters so when we promote bin we feel we are an influence on our peers in the industry to some extent for example in terms of using bit for MEP or the structural model when talking about Bill we find that many companies are already exploring bit but they might not use it for General commercial residential projects most of our business is in Hong Kong and we provide services to developers in Hong Kong the developers used to have the impression that only public projects or large-scale projects can benefit from bid they didn't feel good was necessary for more conventional residential projects we have had a lot of conversations with developers both in business meetings and personal conversations when they discovered that bent brings so much benefit to an Architecture Firm they would ask could Ben have benefits for developers maybe even more than it benefits The Architects because in the end it's the developers who are responsible for future maintenance and building management and when they require a contractor to build a building which applies bin they gradually discover that it benefits developers even more than us so in fact we're sort of a promoter for Ben and this is something we want to be not just be a participant using Bim is become more and more popular what are the main industry directions and Trends we can expect from thin technology in the future after a few detours and ultimately a successful transformation lwk and partners is looking forward to the future what are their views and expectations on them in the foreseeable future we will be able to utilize Bim technology to calculate embodied carbon due energy simulation and even Implement budget controls for now we still do these calculations based on 2D drawings but when you have a big model it already invents these kinds of data we hope that instead of wasting this data we'll be able to utilize it for the analysis tests I just mentioned so we can save a lot of time and spend more time on architectural design instead in terms of Big Industry Trends one of these items where I would like to apply bin is the reason Hot Topic zero carbon carbon neutrality these kinds of requirements how do we measure energy consumption carbon neutrality or zero carbon in the conventional way we need to use a lot of spreadsheets to do the calculation we need to rely on our experience to do estimations this topic will also affect how we promote our carbon neutral projects because now that we have bit and software we can produce realistic statistics calculate data and get the results which can help us a lot in promoting carbon neutrality in addition when it comes to making decisions based on past experience we need to teach our team how to tackle these decisions minip helps us in this process in many ways for example we write a little program for a specific problem or utilize some low-level AI which is quite popular recently or use parametric design these all help a lot in design efficiency they support easier management and a smooth Rhythm for a Project's development bent can help with all these things we believe Ben will become or has already become a basic service every Architecture Firm that is the skill set I mentioned so Ben is now a basic skill set for example in Hong Kong without the help of Bim it would be very hard for us to LEAP to the next level recently more and more companies in our industry including lwk and partners believe that the transformation to Bim is inevitable after a company transforms itself into Bim operation mode they not only improve their operational efficiency but also see big reductions in Manpower costs and increased Revenue but selecting the right Bim software is one of the key successes that they have to reckon with we believe that when industry players start to use and promote the Bim workflow the construction industry will usher in a better future [Music]
2023-08-04 01:53
