What if you could benefit from automation and reduce the workload for your employees?

Is this something that could bring value to your employees, to your business, and last but not least to your customers?

When I talk with people about the digitalization of the AEC industry, the aspect of automation is rarely in focus. Most of the time, it's about better collaboration. And collaboration is an essential tool, concept, or mindset, but it's not an end product. It's not a goal but a method to achieve better results: an essential prerequisite to designing digital workflows. By the way, digital workflows are no goal either. It's about value for the customer.?

Let me give an example of what I mean when talking about collaboration as a prerequisite for automation. A client of mine is exploring what digitalization and BIM mean for one department. To do so, they need input from another department, especially their database structure, the attributes they use, and their values in the database. It would not make sense for the first department to invent everything by itself when it already exists in the other department. It's a real hassle to get this information...

So I recommend approaching any digitalization mindset with the following questions in mind:

1. What means value for the customer? And I talk about the customer from a lean perspective, the next person in the value chain.?
2. What does automation mean for my business case? My business case gets in trouble when I sell hours and do work suddenly in seconds - and I openly discuss the automation with the customer.?
3. What is a stable input I can get to start automation? The usual hindrance that stops people even thinking about automation.

Question two about business value is the hidden reason why so many BIM initiatives in companies fail. Management often sees the introduction of BIM as a mere operational topic that can delight a young and motivated "BIM manager"...

Question three about the stable input is the biggest problem from a technical perspective. Most of the time the input has a vast variety. To deal with this variaty, we are used to reworking manually. Often this manual rework takes as much or even more time than the actual work.?

For example, simulation engineers tell me that up to 50% of the simulation effort is building up the geometric model. Cost planners tell me the quantity takeoff can be up to 90% of their work.?

With the abstractBIM , we started to solve the input quality problem. We can do that for thermal and cost simulations by automatically normalizing the architect's models based on minimal input.?

When talking to customers last year, we learned that they often could not even think about automation because they struggled with questions one and two. There needed to be more resources and awareness to answer the question of collaboration or what data do I/you need in which quality at which time and the question about the business and pricing impact.?

So we decided to consult as well. Now we formalized this to a new product line called pragmaticPROJECTS. With it, we support the whole workflow design.?

The pragmatic swiss BIM standard

One of the results of this consulting work is the "pragmatic Swiss BIM Standard " and a database to communicate this standard better, as well as a mapping tool to map the IFC data to internal database schemes e.g., SAP.?

The pragmatic standard pays special attention to the use of models by non-modelers, such as project managers and building owners.

• The goal is that companies can build cross-project processes based on models and thus handle projects more economically / with less effort.
• The aim is to raise the general planning and construction standard in Switzerland and reduce project risks. The repeated and (semi) automatic planning checking against known project risks helps here.
• The goal is to optimize buildings in early project phases by means of simulations and benchmarking with respect to the project goals.

The pragmatic standard will be free with an open-source license, and I am currently discussing with different essential stakeholders what the future could look like. But the important message is the standard will be open source.?

Please support, use, and give feedback

We are testing and bug fixing the interface and the standard but are ready to share access. (The login page is still in German, but when creating an account, you can choose between English, French, Italian, and German). Most translations from German or English are still made by Google and have no human sanity check..??

So please tell us if you find anything or have recommendations, and we can improve the standard from the bottom up together.