On St. Patrick’s day in March, nine vendors presented to a live audience of 50 or so industry professionals as a part of the COBie2 Challenge at the NFMT conference in Baltimore, Maryland. The results of this challenge were recently posted to the COBie site.
COBie Challenge participants ready to demonstrate compliance live.
Why is this important? Well, if you want to use BIM for commissioning, handover and operations, here’s why COBie and the challenge should be interesting to you:
- The COBie standard brings clarity around what information is being exchanged. The set of COBie fields provides an important first step in clarifying what types of information should be passed from design, through construction to operations.
- The COBie Challenge provides “proof” that the information has actually been exchanged between different systems and the exchanges must be demonstrated in the COBie Challenge environment in front of a live audience (as you can see in the photo).
COBie takes a great first step, but from our experience implementing systems that can leverage BIM for commissioning, handover and operations, we’ve seen that there are more steps that customers want to take on this journey. Our customers have shown us that the key issues around data and documents are twofold; 1) Managing them in more than a one-time mode (i.e., handling updates/changes), and 2) Using them productively during the course of work and operations. For example, once data and documents are linked to the model, how are they kept up to date? What’s the process for updating those? As we’ve noted in other posts, this is the case outlined by Birgitta Foster of Sandia National Laboratories making BIM and facilities management work “just like plugging in my iPod but with no cords.”
To solve this problem, we built a deep integration to Tekla Structures for CM and to Autodesk’s Navisworks. Our customers have called it the “easy button” for leveraging BIM with data for commissioning, handover and operations. The second aspect is leveraging the information where the work gets done -- in the field. Otherwise a solution is “back to where we started.” Meaning, valuable information is being trapped in a three-ring binder in the basement or it’s trapped in a model on someone’s desk.
Watch our webinar featuring Barton Malow and Maryland General hospital where you can hear from the contractor and the owner about how this process is happening today on our projects. Clarity is important as there are so many questions and a lot of interest. But there's still a lot of communication to be done on this important topic. And by the way, Vela Systems passed the COBie2 challenge.
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