Case examples

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Vision

Northumbria University Estates Department manages 32 disparate non-residential buildings on its Newcastle city campus, which totals over 120,000m2.

Northumbria University envisioned BIM usage would deliver efficiencies in the management of its assets.

Process

Detailed discussions were undertaken with the University’s estate department to gain a full understanding of how the spaces of the existing buildings were managed currently, how BIM could add value to the process and what challenges there could be to fully embracing the opportunity.

Existing floor plans, DWG format, scans of the original elevations, sections in JPEG format and space information in Excel databases were used to create models of the campus. In the process, it was revealed that some areas of the 2D plans and elevations did not line up, leading to new surveys being ordered by the estate department to verify the building layout.

Detailed requirements for appropriate BIM uses were developed and then delivered on behalf of the estates team resulting in a federated model in Revit and IFC format.

The data for the 3D federated model was then collected in the same process as Durham Cathedral. Information from the databases was then added to the 3D model. The federated model was delivered in both Revit and IFC format in order to prevent the file becoming out of date and incompatible.

One of the challenges faced by the estate department was the lack of required BIM skills. Once this was resolved, the maintenance of geometric records was accomplished in a more efficient way from both economic and quality perspective.

Change management was as important as the technological improvement. There has been some resistance to change with the estate department; although they could see the tangible benefits, they were initially unwilling to overhaul the processes in place.

Outcome

The cost-efficient creation of a comprehensive intelligent 3D model of the estate, serves as a valuable digital resource to enable workflow efficiencies for the maintenance of asset data. The model has also been used as a test bed to explore the analysis of environmental performance and carbon emissions, as well as a valuable communication and marketing aid for the university and its users.

Among our findings associated with this work to date are that BIM enabled asset and facilities management can offer major efficiency gains in the retrieval and maintenance of drawings and record information. Understanding client specific requirements prior to initiation is important and multi-technology platforms are required, based on open standards. It is also vital that the process for updating the model is carefully considered at the outset.