BAM Ireland Adopts Autodesk BIM 360 and Construction IQ for Full Data Potential

Manu Venugopal, senior product manager, BIM 360 Construction IQ, Autodesk, spoke with AECCafe Voice about BAM Ireland and its data management challenges prior to adopting Autodesk BIM 360 and Construction IQ. Royal BAM is one of Europe’s most successful engineering and construction companies, with over 21,000 employees and thousands of projects ongoing each year. The sheer volume of papers and files the organization handles is astronomical and has been difficult to assemble in a useful and comprehensive way. By digitizing their workflows they were were able to achieve a 20% reduction in on-site quality and safety issues, and 25% more time to focus on high-risk items.

BAM Ireland data capture

• Why was BAM experiencing waste and extra effort in the 40-50 projects they had going on? Is this due to the paper process?

BAM Ireland is an early adopter and market leader in digital construction techniques. However, in a review of their workflows, they found that many teams were still relying on paper for data collection. The manual workflows were slow, time-consuming, and full of hassles. In the course of a project, BAM Ireland teams often collected dozens of racks of papers and files, all of which contained valuable project data. Compiling all that information in a digestible way was a time-consuming task. Besides the time invested in the task, this also meant that all that data wasn’t being used to its full potential.

• Is there something specific about BAM’s workflow that kept them relying on paper on not moving to digital before this solution was found?

As mentioned above, BAM Ireland is an early adopter and market leader in digital construction techniques and they were seeking solutions to help them more fully digitize their processes and standardize across the entire Royal BAM Group.

• How do BIM 360 and Construction IQ manage the construction work on all levels?

BAM is an early adopter of BIM 360 for digitization of their workflows all the way from design to preconstruction, construction execution and operations. Over the last few years they have standardized the processes and started a few projects 100% digital. With Construction IQ running in the background, BAM Ireland created a machine learning environment to manage their data. This enabled them to manage increasing amounts of project information within an automated system. Construction IQ helps project engineers and superintendents to understand which subcontractors carrying risk as well the high risk items from a quality and safety perspective on any given day and take actions based on that. Quality managers, safety managers and other cross project leaders can see which projects are carrying risks and decide how they can intervene to mitigate the risk.

• What is the technology behind Construction IQ?

Behind Construction IQ are artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms designed to deliver risk analysis of quality and safety data from customer project using Autodesk BIM 360. Construction IQ analyzes project data and adds additional intelligence on top of it to surface risks to help everyone on the team. Construction IQ leverages natural language processing algorithms to understand the context of construction data and provide risk analysis for users. These algorithms has been trained on construction data from more than 30000 projects and 150 million quality and safety checklist observations and issues. Whether it’s analyzing quality and safety risks on-site or giving an executive overview of risk potential across projects, Construction IQ serves as a “smart assistant” to looking at all of the project data.

• What was the role of BIM 360? Was that in place before they adopted Construction IQ?

Yes, BAM Ireland was already using Autodesk BIM 360 before they adopted Construction IQ, which means they didn’t need to do anything to start seeing the value of Construction IQ right away. They were using BIM 360 to manage their projects all the way from design to preconstruction to construction execution and operations. As a result, BAM was generating and collecting terabytes of data in each project. With Construction IQ in place, BAM projects had an assistive way to analyze this data in real-time and get valuable insights that helped promote taking actions every day on a jobsite.

• How was Construction IQ received by stakeholders and employees?

The numbers speak for themselves – BAM Ireland achieved a 20% reduction in on-site quality and safety issues, and 25% more time to focus on high-risk items. These are significant results that reduce risk across the entire project lifecycle. Another result is safer and happier work sites for all employees, which improves productivity and morale.

• How did Best Practices change as a result of Construction IQ?

BAM Ireland dramatically improved its data capture techniques, and the workflow is now 95% digital. Today, only mandatory, legal documents are managed on paper.

Tags: 3D, AEC, AutoCAD, Autodesk, building, building design, building information modeling, CAD, construction, engineering, engineers, infrastructure, mobile

Categories: 2D, 3D, AEC, apps, AutoCAD, Autodesk, BIM, construction, construction project management, engineering, field, field solutions, mobile

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