BIM Busters - The Building Information Model is the single source of truth

Debunking the myth that a single BIM can solve all. Therefore, moving from a model towards a workflow focused point of view.

Recently, I talked to an architect friend of mine about the abstractBIM for cost calculation, and he said:

"But Simon, we can do all this in Allplan."

And he is right. I said, yes, you can, but the companies who do the cost calculations don't have access to your Allplan model. Moreover, they work together with many companies, and they all have different ways of modeling. How shall they connect their unit price database to these different quantities? How can they automate their workflow and be more efficient?

"Simon, you are right; even our internal construction managers don't trust the generated lists."

So, BIM is surprisingly the single source of truth - the one place to look and find all the relevant information. Reality is far from this. We have many places where we find information - and to know which one to trust is a big art.

A simple example is floor covering materials. You can find information about floor coverings in :

• 1:50 plans

• IfcSpace and a custom Property

• Floor material plans

• Cost calculation

• Tender/contract documents

• Documents from building physics

• Client's brief

• Room book

• FM platform

• ...

All of these documents (artifacts) have their use and their justification. So, it's less about the single source of truth and more about how information flows in a project between these different artifacts. The data can flow from Artifact 1 → the human mind → Artifact 2 → the human mind → Artifact 3, etc.

That's the "old school" way of working - and it works more or less well. It depends on the involved humans' know-how, stress level, motivation, and mood. In a digital age, the flow would be Artifact 1 → trigger → Artifact 2 → trigger → Artifact 3, or even updating Artifact One again - a bidirectional communication. This has another level of complexity, and people need other skills to manage these kind of workflows.

Here, we can learn from other industries that use more open industry standards to exchange information, such as when Artem Boiko talks about data that needs to be freed from the bounds of CAD/BIM solutions. So that it can be easily manipulated with the proven and easy-to-use data manipulation tools other industries use.

I remember the second large-scale project where I was in charge of the door list. You must know that once you do a door list successfully, you will always do the door list. The reward of a job well done is just more work. In the first project, I had to regularly go through 1000 doors and update the list to any plan change. You can imagine that was a very painful and failure-prone workflow. In the second project, I talked with the IT department, and we set up a workflow to sync the door symbol's width and number with a database. So now, instead of manually going through the plans, I had automation that helped me. We just had to set up a ruleset and best practice behaviors so that nobody in the team deleted the existing doors. It's a different kind of hassle.

We needed to standardize how we work together. We often hear that everything would work if we could only agree on a standard. I believe in two kinds of standards.

1. The rules a team collaboratively decides on to improve their work/workflow.

2. Technical standards that govern technical data exchange for machines.

However, these technical standards will not replace workflow standardization. To believe so is naive, and it will take time:

Recently, the EU passed the law that USB should be the only allowed standard for chargers. USB was introduced in 1996 - 28 years for something "simple" as one plug. Now imagine the complexity of just the simple example of floor materials. It's just mind-blowing!

For successful standardization, you need to have some kind of lobby. For electronics, the lobby was powerful and driven by huge financial interests. Who would be the lobby for floor material workflow standardization?

Therefore, it does not make sense to wait for the holy grail of the single source of truth but to start thinking about the flow of information and how to remove barriers to your work. One step after the other - the opportunities are tremendous!

That’s what drives us at abstractBIM. Currently, we focus on optimizing the (small) but important workflows of cost calculations and energy simulation based on architectural BIMs and just by providing an answer to the question:

“How can we ensure that models from different architects can be compared, and the quantities can be linked to a cost calculation?

I believe that’s the way to go. Focus on a few problems that concern you, find solutions for these, and then make sure you can scale them up so that more people can benefit.