Quantum leap to BIM

Written by Experience Building

Published Tue 16 Dec 2008

Visualisation of Kulturværftet (cultural shipyard) in Elsinore: steel structure in the arcade and concrete structure in building 12, in the background steel excavation of building 11 is shown.

Just two years ago working with CAD was primarily a question of 2D and processing scanned-in manual drawings. Since then Søren Jensen Rådgivende Ingeniørfirma A/S has undergone a complete make-over in the field, as the company now commands what is probably Denmark’s strongest team of engineers using Revit Structure and Revit MEP, Autodesk’s 3D CAD and BIM platforms for engineers working on construction, design, installation, HVAC and electricity. Because the solution is new and not yet particularly widespread on the Danish market, both NTI CADcenter and Autodesk have been heavily involved in the implementation process. While there is widespread market acknowledgement that Søren Jensen is one of the most visionary in the trade, many expressed doubt that a new generation program such as Revit, could be introduced to all the engineers and assistants in the 100-strong company simultaneously! However, manager Frank Jensen, grandson of the company’s founder, Søren Jensen, does not doubt for a second that the company is right to choose the CAD platform.

“A couple of our employees attended Autodesk University in Las Vegas in 2007. We have a very wide international network in general, so we are interested in the kind of success firms are having elsewhere in the world with 3D project design and specifically the Revit platform. Yet in Denmark there was only Revit Architecture, so we were lacking the engineering parts of the program; but when Revit Structure and MEP became available in Denmark, we were fully convinced that it would support our profile in the market and, not least, our visions for building design. At the same time, we also realised full well that it would take quite a bit of work to get it implemented throughout the company’s various specialist groups, but even now we can see we have made the right choice, definitely. I’d say we’re damned near Danish champions on that platform, which is set to spread quietly in the market, and we believe that position is going to be advantageous to us,” Frank Jensen says.

All training completed in three months

For Lars Østberg, head of department at NTI CADcenter, who has been working with Søren Jensen for 15 years, implementing Revit meant collaborating closely with Autodesk. Through similar projects abroad, Autodesk has been able to tap into important implementational experience, and that has been instrumental in ensuring the success of the running-in process in Denmark.

“Søren Jensen has really wanted Revit all along, and that has carried a large part of the project for us. In order to add as much impetus as possible to the implementation, we were asked to handle all the teaching for 45 employees in just three months, so we pulled out all the stops to be able to stick to the timetable and give everyone a good learning experience. Assistants and engineers alike have been involved right from the very start, and especially on the internal communications part Søren Jensen has done a colossal job in making sure that everyone was singing from the same hymn sheet throughout the process. There is no doubt that the project has been a great challenge for all parties, but with some collective assistance and a positive approach to things, we have succeeded in piloting a Danish engineering enterprise just as far into the future as some of the biggest names around the world,” says Østberg.

Visualisation of the bearing steel construction of a bridge spanning a water obstacle at Farum Golf Club.

Different appreciation of geometry

One of the fields in which Søren Jensen is fully reaping the benefits of the new object-oriented BIM platform is on the installation side. The novel thing is that the geometry follows the 3D model, and hence it suddenly becomes possible to test for collisions with greater oversight and reliability. It used to be a case of delving into some sectional drawings wherever problems could be expected, but that was often a bit too haphazard and resulted in expensive interruptions on the building site because not all mistakes were caught in the drawing office. Now, on the other hand, the engineers can design and subsequently test for collisions before things leave the drawing office, and that makes for a much better flow in the work on site.

“Among other things, we have been working in 3D on a hospital project in Aalborg, where we have displayed the entire engineering room to the HVAC staff–metalworkers, welders and pipe fitters–attached to the project in 3D on wide-screen. That produced an altogether different appreciation of the geometry and the route of the installations through the rooms and up on the roof, and that proved to be of great value to the craftsmen. Things were better coordinated, and there’s no doubt that it produced a better end-result for the client with fewer interruptions along the way,” says Michael Porskær, an engineer at Søren Jensen Rådgivende Ingeniørfirma.

Even the installations themselves can be very difficult for non-specialists to form an overview of, as they appear exclusively as lines on a flat 2D drawing. With the 3D BIM models, the assistants at the drawing office gain a much better understanding of the whole, and the spatiality of the various projects, and as key employees at Søren Jensen, therefore, they have also been a regular part of the training plan that NTI CADcenter has combine-developed with Søren Jensen.

Learning by playing

The implementation process has been in progress over the space of a year, and because the change to Revit has been a technological and platform-related desire rather than a project-driven necessity, Søren Jensen began the basic training at Revit Architecture back in October 2007. Employees dealing with designs received three days’ basic and two days’ expert tuition on Revit, while the Revit platform in the installation field is so new here in Denmark that Søren Jensen himself has compiled part of the course material, tailoring it to the company’s own needs as well. Here the employees have received three days’ basic and three days’ subject-specific on superstructure.

Technical room: Århus Hospital, Tage Hansens Gade-ward: stem cell transplant unit. Visualisation of ventilation and plumbing installations.

“We’ve been kitted out really well over the course, and after that we simply dove into the tools under the mantra of ‘learning by fooling around’. That also tells you something about implementation having been seen through by some enthusiast capable of letting their fervour for the program rub off on everyone else, and about us not being afraid of getting our fingers dirty generally. The whole thing has certainly been a bit ‘typically Søren Jensen’, but that’s how we think. We’re extremely powerfully armed with Revit, and our installation and design engineers can merge their BIM models suddenly and adjust the design collectively at the speed of light. We can really see the value of that”, says Ulrik Sohn Kaeseler, an engineer from Søren Jensen Rådgivende Ingeniørfirma.

New hospital

Søren Jensen is one of three engineering firms that have won a competition for the new Skejby Hospital. The company forms part of the consortium Rådgivergruppen DNU (DNU Consultants Group), which includes a total of 10 companies, whose task it is to realise the 250,000 new square metres of Skejby Hospital over the next 12-plus years. The consortium has set up a complete drawing office around the project, which already has well over 100 employees attached, and until the start-up of project design the holistic plan is what counts. The consortium works with everything from quality assurance to joint drawing office standards, and one of the important decisions is the choice of CAD platform.

“Of course, we want to bring our experience with Revit into the discussion, because once we get beyond the introductory outline in AutoCAD, among other things, then of course we’ll have to commit ourselves to which 3D platform to build the project on. We ourselves will have 20-30 employees allocated when the whole thing is running on all cylinders, and our experience is quite obviously that using 3D will mean a distinct strengthening of such a large project involving so many people and different specialist groups. We’re proud of having already come as far as we have with Revit, and we view our own quantum leap as a good argument for the Revit platform. So we have an opportunity to deliver the very finest in integrated, interdisciplinary design”–that’s the conclusion drawn by Frank Jensen.

For further information about Søren Jensen Rådgivende Ingeniørfirma, please see www.sj.dk