4/24/19 – BD+C Magazine: Can Digital Twin make project management more efficient?
One leading owner’s rep is pushing that idea with its “OneModel” BIM-sharing approach.
By John Caulfield, Senior Editor
Yehudi “Gaf” Gaffen has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of construction management as CEO of Gafcon, the owner’s rep firm based in San Diego that he and wife Pam founded in 1987. Even as construction technology has helped topple silos that separate Building Team members, Gaffen still laments the industry’s dysfunction, especially in what he sees as the needlessly redundant way Building Information Modeling (BIM) data are shared and exchanged during the construction process and beyond. (The insurance and risk management company Aon has estimated that as much as 40% of the data needed to manage a building are lost before they’re handed off to the management team).
“It’s been my experience that many [BIM] drawings that are assumed to be passed along aren’t,” says Gaffen. “Now, you can’t find anything. This isn’t efficient; it just wastes time and money.” “The problem has been that there are multiple systems” of communication between the owner and its AEC and management partners, explained John Turner, Gafcon’s Vice President of Innovation Solutions, during a keynote speech he delivered last October at BIMobject Live in Malmö, Sweden. What’s needed, he stated, is a “common data environment” and a platform that allows communication across all stake-holding entities, technologies, and organizational groups.
“The question that needs to be answered,” adds Gaffen, “is ‘how do you warehouse and expand data?’ And the more complex the project, the less efficient the old way of managing information is.” Gaffen advocates a better way, one that deploys Digital Twin technology to develop “a roadmap, a blueprint” for establishing a protocol for information exchange. Digital Twin allows users to build the project before it’s built. And Gafcon’s OneModel approach gets all members of the construction and management teams using BIM in the same way. It provides the team with a collaborative and managed virtual environment, where problems can be addressed. The OneModel approach would reduce the time it takes to make decisions, and could be coordinated across the building’s lifecycle ...Read More>
