What Does a BIM-Neutral Platform Mean for Your Firm? for Your Owners?
Posted by Holly Allison on Wed, Apr 21, 2010 @ 12:42 PM
One of my first experiences with the AGC BIM Forum was a breakout session on interoperability. The goal of the session was to line up all the vendors on stage and frankly answer audience questions about our product roadmap goals.
What we all realized after the session was the poor job we were doing at letting the AEC/O Market know about our partnerships and work to make BIM an easier technology to digest.
For example, did you know that Vico Office reads Tekla, Revit, and ArchiCAD BIMs? With the next release, we'll be able to import CAD-Duct, IFC files, and sbxml formats important to our Nordic customers. CAD-Duct is a very important platform for MEP subcontractors; and IFC compatibility will allow us to work with Bentley files.
Creating this BIM-neutral platform has been job #1 for Vico since we became our own company. After we spun out of Graphisoft's construction division in 2007, we knew that we would need to be CAD-agnostic in order to succeed in the market.
That has been our goal with Vico Office. We want to accept as many BIM file formats as possible so that our users can take BIM to the next level: constructability, scheduling, estimating, and production control. It's one thing to have a BIM model for visualization, but it's quite another ROI proposition to use that same BIM to derive quantities, schedules, estimates, and then drive the play-by-play on the jobsite with production control.
What does this mean to the Owner? Very simply: the architectural BIM can be in Revit; the structural BIM can be in Tekla; the MEP can be in CAD-Duct. We want to get to the point where you can fill in the blank with the BIM authoring tool that you prefer. We make the transaction as simple as possible: modelers have a special "publish to Vico" menu option.
This has a special implication to the market, too. For the first time, creating a BIM-based schedule or estimate does not mean that your schedulers and estimators need to learn CAD. Everyone sticks to their knitting, but in a collaborative workspace. So if a model element gets modified or replaced, the schedulers' and estimators' calculations get updated. A change in one location is reflected across the workspace.
At the next AGC BIM Forum in June we'll be working on a matrix to help customers know which systems work with other vendors' systems. We hope to highlight the great partnerships that already exist in the industry and hear your suggestions for workflows that would make your BIM efforts flow more smoothly.
Read up on Vico's partnerships and how we're working to make 5D BIM a reality for project teams. And please take a moment to let us know which workflows are important to you. We're working on some very exciting connections with other software applications.