A Case Study of a Design Firm That Completed the Production-Mode Transformation from "CAD Design" to "BIM Design"
WeChat Sync · Xiaowei · 2023-09-18
Guangzhou Pearl River Foreign-Funded Architectural Design Institute Co., Ltd. (Pearl River Design) began in 2019/7 the transformation of its design production method from “CAD design” to “BIM design”. In 2021, it publicly announced that it had achieved “full-establishment BIM forward design”. It has never backtracked since, but has continued along the path of using BIM design in all its in-house projects, going ever finer and ever deeper.
For an introduction to the system and experience of Pearl River Design's full-establishment BIM (forward) design, please refer to the relevant official materials. Here, as half a participant and half an observer, I would like to share my personal observations of what is, so far, the only design-enterprise sample I have seen or heard of in which a design institute of five to six hundred people uses BIM design across every project in the entire enterprise.
First, a brief note on several terms relevant to this article. “BIM design”, also known as BIM forward design, refers to a design method that uses the BIM model as its main carrier, with 2D-3D linkage, to express and deepen engineering design intent, coordinate disciplines, output drawings, and ensure that the delivered design results are consistent between drawings and model. By contrast, the design method that uses a computer with 2D drawings as its main carrier is called ““CAD design”. “Full-establishment BIM design” refers to the state in which a design enterprise uses the BIM design method for project design at scale, as a norm, and on a sustained basis.
1. Is it true that Pearl River Design uses BIM design for all its projects?
As far as I know, quite a few peers share this doubt, and the reason is simple: over the past 20 years, a large number of design enterprises have tried to do this but none succeeded. So it is only natural to raise a long string of question marks over Pearl River Design's claim of achieving full-establishment BIM design in which every project is designed using BIM.
In 2002, the BIM term was accepted by peers worldwide and was first explored in the design field, because in essence BIM is a technology for expressing design intent and carrying project information. China was no exception, where design enterprises also took the lead in using it. The subsequent development is well known to all and needs no elaboration. I have been working in this field since 2003, engaged in BIM application research and promotion, and I happened to experience this whole process from start to finish.
It is not difficult for a design enterprise to use the BIM design method for one or two projects; what is difficult is using BIM design for all projects. To achieve this goal, three conditions must be met simultaneously: first, the design cycle stays unchanged; second, the delivered results are consistent between drawings and model; third, the extra labor (cost) input is affordable for the enterprise. If even one of these three conditions can be relaxed, the difficulty of achieving BIM design for all projects drops dramatically.
If the design cycle is lengthened, the project owner will not agree; if the drawing and model information are inconsistent, the model cannot establish its legal status; and if the extra labor input is too large, the enterprise cannot sustain it.
To ensure that the BIM design cycle for all of a design institute's projects matches that of the existing CAD design, at least two guarantees are needed. The first is that BIM various technical problems encountered during the design process must be resolved in a timely manner; this is easy to understand and will not be elaborated. The second is that BIM capabilities must be strong enough, and the proportion of personnel with sufficiently strong capabilities must be high enough. The technical abilities of a design enterprise's staff can be divided into two broad categories: engineering ability and BIM ability. There is no substantive difference between the engineering abilities of staff at different design enterprises in meeting their respective design task needs. The factor that truly affects a design enterprise's full-establishment BIM design transformation is that the proportion of personnel with sufficient BIM ability cannot be too low; otherwise it cannot support the transformation of all the enterprise's projects to BIM design. When Pearl River Design launched its full-establishment BIM design, this personnel ratio was about 1:4, that is, among every five designers, one is a person with relatively strong BIM ability who can support the other four in using BIM for design.
There are two possible paths to ensuring consistency between drawings and model. The first is to make the model the single information carrier of the project, with all drawings being one hundred percent automatic exports of the model. This is the ideal state, but it will still take a fairly long time to achieve, and when it can be realized cannot be predicted today. Pearl River Design has adopted the second path, which is achievable at the current level of technology and management: drawings and model coexist with 2D-3D linkage, and dedicated tools are developed so that CAD drawings are exported from the BIM model, while modifications made in CAD can be fed back into the model for updating.
Compared with CAD design, BIM design does not merely change the software tools; its design results are also finer and richer than those of CAD design. Therefore, it is normal that BIM design requires more labor input than CAD design; the question is how much extra labor is added. If a design enterprise uses BIM design only on some pilot or demonstration projects, the impact is small, but when all projects use BIM design, this becomes an insurmountable obstacle. In the early stage of launching full-establishment BIM design, Pearl River Design's projects needed to add about 25% more labor. At present, each project basically only needs one additional BIM discipline lead, responsible for all planning, management, and technical support work related to the project's BIM design. This should be a labor increment that design enterprises can afford.
Are there still problems in Pearl River Design's transformation of the production method for all its projects from CAD design to BIM design? The answer is yes; some problems are still fairly serious or even acute, but all of them are now merely technical and managerial issues, no longer a matter of the production method reverting from BIM design back to CAD design—just like the transition from drawing boards to CAD more than twenty years ago.
2. The importance and possibility of the entire industry transforming its design production method from CAD design to BIM design
Based on the degree of data structuring, engineering project design results can be roughly divided into three categories: images, videos, PDF, word, and so on are unstructured data; DWG and the like are semi-structured data; Excel, BIM models, and the like are structured data.
Peers have all noticed that, at the end of June, the 10th International BIM Technology Exchange Conference held in Chengdu showed an obvious change compared with previous editions: everyone was talking about “data” and looking ahead to the various possibilities that “data” could enable, including integrated design and quantity takeoff, digital construction, smart construction, intelligent construction, City Information Modeling (CIM), digital twin, smart city, metaverse, and so on. The “data” mentioned in these visions should mainly be structured data, and at the present stage the main carrier of structured data for engineering projects is the BIM model.
In an era when drawings are the legally required deliverables, the reliability of the data carried by the BIM model must be determined by judging whether the drawings and model are consistent. Therefore, although there can theoretically be multiple ways to produce a BIM model, in practice, for new projects, apart from adopting the method of “BIM design, drawings derived from the model, and drawing-model linkage”, other methods are technically hard to guarantee and economically unaffordable.
If the data reliability of the BIM models for all projects cannot be guaranteed, then all the above application visions based on project model data can only be water without a source and a tree without roots; they cannot enter everyday productive application and can only remain at the stage of research and experimentation. Therefore, transforming the design production method of the entire industry from CAD design to BIM design is a problem that the digitalization of the construction industry cannot bypass and must solve.
Although so far there have been no public reports of other large and medium-sized design enterprises achieving full-establishment BIM design, quite a few enterprises have invested manpower and resources in exploring and implementing a comprehensive transformation from CAD design to BIM design. From small signs one can see the larger trend: based on observation of the entire process by which Pearl River Design achieved BIM design transformation for all its projects, one can infer that when an enterprise's proportion of personnel with relatively strong BIM capabilities has accumulated to a certain level, when the various software tools and design resource libraries needed for BIM design have accumulated to a certain level, and when the amount of extra labor needed for project BIM design has dropped to a certain level, the conditions for that enterprise to launch full-establishment BIM design are basically mature. When most design enterprises meet these conditions, the time will have arrived for the production method of the entire design industry to transform from the current CAD design to BIM design.
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