Solibri plays the lead role in our BIM workflow
for us to improve quality, lead time and total costs of
a project. And Solibri plays the lead in this all.”
Albert Gils, BIM manager at De RuwBouw Group (DRBG), is responsible for the BIM workflow implementation in his organization. The RuwBouw Group offers structural solutions from prefab walls and floors, sand-lime products to complete carcassing. They are big believers of BIM, because collaboration between all the stakeholders in the early phase of a construction project leads to better and more efficiently built buildings in the end. Albert’s focus is on the engineering department, but he also sees potential for the calculation, sales and logistics department. His ambition is to make the complete organization to think and breathe BIM, taking them to the next BIM level.
Almost all clients of DRBG who worked with BIM used Solibri Model Checker, and the number of users has increased especially during the last few years. Albert tells that the company recognized the value of Solibri years ago and have been working with it since 2012. “Now DRBG executes most projects in BIM, and over the years we developed our own vision and BIM workflow for ourselves, based on the openBIM definition from BuildingSMART. One of the most important parts is to improve the exchange of building information, both internally and externally. IFC is essential in this process, because you should be able to exchange building information across multiple BIM platforms, without the loss of information. Simultaneously, BIM is the perfect instrument for us to improve quality, to manage time and to control the total costs of a project. And Solibri plays the lead in this all.”
DRBG has written their own DRBG BIM coordination protocol about processes and key points of the DRBG BIM workflow:
1 Embrace openBIM; everyone is working with their own software. Exchanging models will happen as much as possible through the open IFC standard.
2 Working LEAN; engineering and pro-
duction are based on complete and correct
information.
3 Share knowledge to support the design/modelling process.
4 Shorten lead time of engineering.
5 Quality checks for all incoming and outgoing models are done
with Solibri Model Checker.
“We use Solibri Model Checker to check if the right data is in the model, to extract quantities and for clash detection. The latter feature is important to us because we need to clash a lot of discipline models against each other. As stated before, the collaboration in an early phase saves us a lot of headaches, time and money. Finding clashes during the construction phase is expensive and inefficient. We are also very happy with the possibility to make our own rulesets, and the intuitive interface of Solibri Model Checker makes it easy. We have rulesets based on specific Dutch Information Delivery Manuals for example (BIM basis ILS). Our calculation department mainly uses the Information TakeOffs (ITOs) within Solibri Model Checker to extract the quantities from the model.”
“At this point, our focus lies on educating the engineering department of the company, so they can all work and contribute to this BIM workflow. In the next three months, we will have 80 colleagues following the in-company Solibri course. And a few of them will continue with an advanced course to learn how to make their own rulesets and use ITOs.”
“For the future, we would like to extend our BIM workflow up to after the production phase. We already send IFC files to the factory, and we are researching the possibilities of adding information from the production line to the BIM model. This information can then be shared with our client. It is still work in progress, but we will get there.”
