Archibus Smart Client Extension for Revit
Archibus Best Practices for BIM Execution Plans
Your BIM projects start and end with your BIM Execution Plan. The plan sets out:
- The defensible, high-value business goals you have for using BIM data
- The elements of information you need for achieving those business goals, and how they flow from one stakeholder to another
Archibus provides a platform for BIM execution. All stakeholders can interact within the Archibus environment, flow communications without retyping, execute quality control procedures, and flow information into and out of BIM models automatically.
Your Business Goals
Your business goals are the key drivers for organizing your project and provide an essential means of measuring success.
The objective of a BIM project isn't to use BIM. The objective is to drive your organization's primary mission. If you are a university, that's educating students. If an automobile factory, that's making cars. If a healthcare facility, it's curing the ill. There are many follow-on benefits for having rich hand-off information from design, and clearly cataloging the design and construction information carefully for future use is a must. However, accurate, consistent, and relevant information does not come for free, does not meet the quality bar without explicit oversight, and does not stay up-to-date without a cost. If you enumerate your business goals up-front, you ensure that you are incurring that cost for a defensible purpose.
For that reason, when your BIM Execution Plan includes a type of information, you should start by evaluating the specific business functional goal that element supports.
High-value business goals for BIM hand-off data are:
- Commissioning, including hand off of as-builts, schedules, and documents to a document management system
- Space management and planning
- Space chargeback to internal departments and external parties (insurance carriers, government grants, tenants)
- On demand (reactive) and preventive maintenance of equipment
References for Integrating Your Business Goals with BIM
For more information on business goals, you may wish to review the BIM Execution Planning project at Pennsylvania State University (http://bim.psu.edu/Uses/default.aspx ) This project identified the high-value goals for BIM integration. The operational goals the project states are essentially the ones stated here.
Other good references are the United States General Services Administration's GSA BIM Guides, Series 02 - Spatial Program Validation and Series 08 - Facility Management (http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/105075 ). These standards identify specific pieces of hand-off data that the US government uses for its large-scale building program. The links below discuss these government standards and how they affect the BIM to Archibus handoff.
See Also
The following sections look at each of these business goals, the way that Archibus can help achieve them, and the specific recommendations you need in your BIM Execution Plan to position your project for success.