Register now to attend November’s BIM Show Live for Manufacturers

Today, BIM.Technologies can excitedly unveil the third and final of this year's BIM Show Lives. This one has a very specific, very significant purpose.

BIM Show Live for Manufacturers represents a fantastic springboard for the nation’s manufacturers to acquaint themselves with BIM. The organisers have amassed a typically strong array of speakers to educate manufacturers on the palpable strengths of BIM, with each succinct 45-minute talk with only one audience in mind.

And since this is a BIM Show Live event, it will follow a familiar template. The four topics making up the template are Define & Validate; Design & Prototype; Manufacture & Assemble; and Operate & Maintain. Over the course of one day, we’ll guide attendees through the entire process, transforming abstract concepts into easily understood ideas. To help with that, we’ve set aside time for a closing Q&A session for any lingering queries.

BIM is helping to dramatically improve building projects across the world. When fully BIM literate, firms are able to better communicate and coordinate both internally and externally. This isn't just an undertaking for architects and construction firms, but for manufacturers, too.

The Space Group stable of businesses, which includes BIM.Technologies, are at the forefront of this movement, and our bimstore division, which runs a UK-leading library full of manufacturer-specific BIM objects, have stepped forward as the day’s sponsors.

We’ve booked out the Building Centre in London for this event, which will take place on the 20th of November. You can state your interest here. The designated hashtag for the night's Twitter-based discussion is #BSL4M.

And the Lend Lease Award for Innovation goes to... BIM.Tech and friends!

For a good while now, BIM.Technologies has been involved in the enormous North Wales Prison project, a 2,100-person facility designated by the government as a trial project for its 2016 Level 2 BIM mandate. Such a large undertaking is a job for multiple parties, so as Information Manager we are in constant dialogue with our colleagues as we determine the project's overall BIM strategy.

Things seem to be going rather well, given that the entire project team last week received the Award for Innovation at Lend Lease's Public Sector Awards. Olly Thomas was representing us at the event, and can be seen below, stood dead centre.


North Wales is an exacting project that requires precise teamwork. It's for that reason that we'd like to commend the other firms involved for their work so far.

Great work, all!

Our TRON moment: BIM.Technologies is working on the Oculus Rift

So, Space Group CEO Rob Charlton, what do you think of version 2 of the Oculus Rift development kit now that you've had a turn?


That's a thumbs up, we think.
 

And you, Paul Broadfoot? What do you think of the ability to walk around a building, checking it for design flaws and other irregularities, before work has even started on site? Because that's precisely what BIM.Technologies is aiming for in its experiments with the hardware. Work's already started converting one of our BIM-enabled projects into a full-size model the user can move around in. You like that?

Another thumbs up

Like Google Glass, Space Group sees Oculus Rift as a vehicle for change in the construction industry. With it, architects can now examine their proposals inside out. Walking around the virtual form of a building allows us to gauge its more intangible elements - like atmosphere - meaning we can make changes based on our experiences inside the headset.

Using the Rift in conjunction with existing software, we hope to further reduce risk and waste, and we're not averse to having fun whilst doing it. Space Group's _space Architects division was the first architectural business to only deliver information in 3D, and in purchasing a Rift we intend to be among the first to scope out the new possibilities presented to us.

It's worth enthusing, too, about just how absorbing a few minutes spent in the Rift can be. Our early sojourns into virtual reality have seen us strut around spaceships, awed by the images of space in the cockpit. Obviously, the projects we'll be working on are grounded in reality, and an amble through the corridors of a real-world building was, whilst not as fantastical, still popular.

We'll bring you more news on our grand adventure with the Rift soon. Excited for that, BIMcrunch Editor Jack White?

Yep...

BIMcrunch v2 launched - interviews with BIM.Tech personnel to come

Our Space Group sibling BIMcrunch has gone live with its new site, which re-colours, rejigs, and refreshes many of the news portal's features. It's been designed from the get-go to be an essential resource to everyone in the BIM trade, making it worthy of a place in your bookmarks bar.

More information on the new iteration of BIMcrunch can be found here and here.

BIM.Tech is particularly excited at all this because, this week, you can expect the first ever "Crunch Time" with our Technology Director Adam Ward, a two-minute interview that deals in snappy answers. Very fun.

Autumn 2014 issue of Level Three goes to press

Work has finished on the latest issue of Level Three, the BIM.Technologies magazine that zeroes in on the projects which our BIM consultancy division has applied its expertise to over the past year. Watch out for updates on North Wharf Road, which serves as our cover star, as close to a pin-up as a BIM can get.


Click for a far larger version

In this edition, to be sent out to our partners and associates next week, we interview James Pellatt of Great Portland Estates. James is Head of Projects at the London-based developer, making his thoughts on BIM especially relevant and especially worthy of examination.

We also partake in a bit of storytelling, with a summary of COBie's history, and an overview of how we tackle the process at BIM.Technologies. Olly Thomas walks us through his role as an Information Manager, and we recap BIM Show Live 2014, BIM.Tech's biggest, grandest event to date.

At yesterday's Meet the Hospital Bidders event, we handed out advance copies of the mag. serving as a companion to Olly's speech on the strengths of BIM.

Check back next week for some more BIM.Technologies news, which came too late to sneak into Level Three.

We're sponsoring Birmingham City Council's Meet the Hospital Bidders event

Now that BIM.Technologies is active in the Midlands, we've started to get involved with the region's regular industry events.

'Meet the Hospital Bidders' is a day-long conference jointly organised by the Sandwell and Birmingham City councils, its purpose to promote the robust supply chain infrastructure of the West Midlands to hospital construction teams both national and international.

A free event which has attracted the likes of Balfour Beatty and Laing O'Rourke, MtHB comes soon after planning permission was granted to the Midland Metropolitan hospital, a £353m development located in Smethwick.

BIM.Technologies is proud to be a sponsor of tomorrow's event, and we're happier still to be appearing on stage. Our Information Manager Olly Thomas is to give a speech alongside bimstore's Gill Smith on BIM's importance to the future of the health sector.

Around 100 exhibitors have registered to attend, with keynote speeches scheduled throughout the day. MtHB takes place at Bethel Convention Centre in West Bromwich from 8:30am onwards, lasting until 03:00pm.

See BIMcrunch's article for more details.

What we can do for you – 240 Blackfriars

If you're the head of a property developer and you have the chance to make a £4.5m saving on a project, would you investigate further? BIM offered exactly that sort of reduction in cost to Great Portlands Estates on its recently completed 240 Blackfriars development. And by recruiting BIM.Technologies, Space Group's BIM consultancy division, GPE had someone to guide things along.

Blackfriars was one of BIM.Technologies' first "mega-projects". It's a mammoth 19-storey office block in London which is already renting its nine top floors to United Business Media. Designers AHMM have achieved a genuine one person per eight-square feet floorplan, creating a building that looks good and works well.

BIM.Technologies was faced with some unique challenges during the course of their work. There was, for instance, a rooftop plant room to consider - backward compared to most buildings. But because BIM.Tech are specialists in their field, they were able to create the architectural BIM that was subsequently aligned with the structural and services design models to form a coordinated project BIM.

Great Portland Estates estimates that for every pound funnelled into BIM, they saved two pounds in the contract sum.

Part of this can be credited to the 4D time-lining features of BIM, which effectively gives construction firms the ability to "rehearse" their work, checking in advance for errors in logistics or sequencing.

The completion of 240 Blackfriars is one of BIM.Tech's biggest milestones to date, but we have other mega-projects still to come, such as Google's London Headquarters.

More information on how BIM.Technologies helped shape the Blackfriars project can be found on the consultancy's website.