BIM COORDINATORS SUMMIT 2023 | Where Minds Meet & Information Matters
The Holy Grail for Collaboration: A Connected Common Data Environment By Connor Alexander, CTO at BIMLauncher
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anual processes in cross-platform workflows negatively impact the success of delivering construction projects. Double data entry incurs an average 73% productivity loss, 70% slowed info workflows and 62% frequency of data entry errors1. Automating these workflows between platforms reduces these inefficiencies towards zero.
Connor Alexander is the CTO at BIMLauncher. He has always been at the connection between user and technology, whether helping to plan and design solutions or giving thought leadership presentations and talks on the subject. He enjoys visualising complex systems, and is fascinated with the management of information in relation to the delivery and operations of assets in our built environment.
Where is manual input required in a CDE? On any given digitally enabled construction project, the CDE is distributed between different software platforms typically used by different teams, or in different project phases. The variance in platforms used on a project comes as a result of differing needs: some are more suited to certain domainspecific requirements than others, and/or teams may already be trained to use specific software, and/or they may be locked into it commercially. “There is a potential misconception that the CDE is more about technology and less about workflows. In fact, it is fundamental that workflows are developed first and solutions are selected to facilitate the workflow.” 2
REFERENCES
Images Figure 1: Dodge, Data & Analytics. (2023) Connecting Owners and Contractors. How Technology Drives Connected Construction, page 5. Available at: https:// learn.assetlifecycle.trimble.com/ebooks/connecting-owners-and-contractors-how-technology-drives-connected-construction
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Teams are continuously collaborating via workflows that traverse different platforms, and using more than one creates digital thresholds between them that need to be overcome. In the context of a CDE, digital thresholds create risks and inefficiencies in the construction project due to the manual information exchange required to execute workflows across them. This ultimately fragments the collaborative experience and impacts productivity. More complex workflows bring with them more risks, especially when humans manually carry out information exchange processes within them. Some workflows between teams require that documents are transferred between platforms. A requirement to exchange documents across platforms spawns document control tasks, which are manual processes and not always trivial. How do manual tasks create problems? Submittals can be large (for example, drawings from the design to client team at the end of the detailed design phase), and metadata needs to be accurately interpreted from the source software platform and inputted to the target software platform. This takes time and an understanding of the platforms involved.