BIM Model More Valuable Thanks to Mobile

Part 2 of 2

SAN FRANCISCO—In part 1 of this two-part exclusive Q&A, Amy Bunszel, V.P. of the AutoCAD Product Line Group of Autodesk, told GlobeSt.com that “technology disrupters” are enabling products to be built today that could not have even been envisioned or executed 15-20 years ago. In part 2 of that Q&A, Bunszel, who will serve as a panelist at the upcoming CREW California Conference April 24-26 in San Francisco, chats about mobile devices and their impact on the commercial real estate industry as well as how technology is affecting the management of building performance.

GlobeSt.com: Mobile devices have also had a huge impact on the commercial real estate industry. How are mobile devices currently being leveraged at construction sites?

Bunszel: Mobile devices and software are having a significant and positive impact on construction activities and processes. Fundamentally, mobile is providing a much better platform for real-time collaboration and coordination across construction project teams and stakeholders.  Mobile is directly improving ways in which data from the field is captured, including better quality data for commissioning and handover. Mobile is enabling a BIM model to be accessible to sub-contractors and workers in the field, to improve understanding of issues like clash detection and coordination. Mobile supports improved quality and safety management, to identify trends and risk; mobile enables better tracking of punch list items, etc.  New applications for this technology are appearing at a rapid pace making the BIM model even more valuable during construction and beyond.

GlobeSt.com: Another topic of interest you will be covering at the CREW California is building performance. How is technology affecting the management of building performance?

Bunszel: There has been increasing sophistication in simulation and analysis technology that enables understanding of building performance during the design phase of a project -- e.g. how a building should perform, once occupied. This has been extremely helpful for owners as they make design decisions early on that will impact performance--before the costly phase of construction begins.

Following completion of construction, given the level of sophistication found in building systems today, there's an incredible amount of information available to owners and operators, generated from the building management system (BMS).  It's a 'big data' opportunity in that owners have more and more data provided to them than ever before about the building performance -- given all the instrumentation that is part of a project (sensors, meters, sub meters, thousands of points, etc).  It's important for owners to understand how to leverage this information to understand the relationship between the various systems (cause & effect, fault detection and alarms) as well as the impact of occupiers on performance (e.g. did someone leave a window open overnight?)
Autodesk is directly looking at these issues to bring both sides of the equation into alignment - reconciling design intent performance with post occupancy performance and working to connect BIM with BMS.