Can you imagine being a designer at Tesla, coming up with innovative and cool ways to make the whole driving experience as easy, painless and downright fun as you can. The cars can drive literally themselves for f%$k sakes, and you can summon them to come to you rather than having to walk a few metres to get in the thing. It has neat little widgets and doodads in it’s control system that engage and delight, and can even play a party piece with it’s doors. It’s brilliant!
Now let’s imagine you are not a Tesla designer but a hard working BIM Ninja or BIM Weasel dreaming up innovative and frankly epic ways to automate the process of delivering enormous projects that will change the lives of millions, and you work together with other like-minded ninjas and weasels to create a system which takes all the effort out of coordinating the deliverables from an MEP design. Drawings, schedules and asset information, even COBie data can be output from the models with barely any effort, thanks to predefined templates, view templates, schedules, families (or cells, library components, depends on your weapon of choice) and extensive documentation that describes how they can all be used in harmony to make the final mad dash to the submission date as smooth and calm as a Sade CD.
And then, with a few weeks to submission you get a panic call from the MEP project manager asking for more resources, so you assign one of our dynamic BIM cat herders to crack the whip and get things back into shape. What he found was one of the worst cases of bumbling stupidity ever encountered.
Back to our Tesla designer, after all that you have done to create the most awesome automotive experience, can you imagine if the user punches a hole in the floor, extends his legs through the hole and starts propelling the car along with his feet, like, you know Fred Flintstone.
This was effectively what we found when we investigated the reasons why the MEP team were so far behind schedule. The tightly coordinated BIM ecosystem we gave them to develop their designs was almost completely ignored and they used primitive pre-CAD processes and workflows.
Lets go through some of the astonishing feats of BIM fuckwittery the MEP team inflicted on the project.
- Ignoring the fully developed family elements that had 2D symbolic and 3D geometry, parameters for all the asset data, classification and COBie stuff that linked in to schedules, and using old dumb families with no 3D geometry and no intelligent parameters.
- Not reading the equipment identification requirements for the project, a large rail project with 16 stations, 2 depots, 60km of track, and missing one of the biggest requirements of all, the element type with the most number of instances. Cables.
- Creating schedules, by hand, line by line and text by text on dumb drafting views. I kid you not, in 2021 they were creating fucking schedules manually.
- Not setting up the models for automation making delivery submissions take 3 times longer than they need to be.
- And many many more…
Now you might be forgiven for thinking this team of knuckle dragging oafs were working for some cheap offshore sweatshop or tier 4 subbie, but sadly no. This was a tier 1, global powerhouse.