BUILDING INFORMATION MODELLING (BIM)
BIM adoption across the world (Source: Eischet, O. 2022, Medium)
How BIM will continue to shape civil infrastructure in the year ahead As we enter 2024, the construction industry and its professionals will renew their focus on growth and innovation in support of civil infrastructure development. IMIESA caught up with Shuaib Yunos, Senior BIM Technical Specialist & Coordination Manager: Civil Infrastructure & Mining at AECOM in South Africa, who shares his insights on why digitisation will increasingly be the key enabler – now and in the future.
Shuaib Yunos, Senior BIM Technical Specialist & Coordination Manager: Civil Infrastructure & Mining at AECOM
10 IMIESA Jan/Feb 2024
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unos is a prominent global figure and champion in the Building Information Modelling (BIM)/ Digital Engineering space, affiliated with ECSA, SAICE and IMESA. He has worked on a variety of civil infrastructure and mining projects worldwide, and has shared his expertise through various events, conferences, and publications, including training and educating hundreds of professionals across the world. This led him to winning the Green Hat Award for South Africa at the BIM Africa Innovation Awards 2021, competing against 289 nominations from various countries across the African continent. The Green Hat Award recognises an Exceptional Individual of African descent who demonstrates outstanding achievements and remarkable service in advocating the adoption
of BIM and digital technologies across Africa. The following are his responses to a range of key questions:
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How would you describe BIM and its benefits in an informal way to a firsttime user? Let’s say you need to build a house out of LEGO®. You have a bucket containing these pieces of different shapes, colours, and sizes (equating to project teams, roles, design models, etc.). BIM can be seen as the methodology that will enable you to combine these LEGO pieces together to, say, build the best house possible, optimising and informing the usage and placement of each LEGO block. The bucket will represent the location where you store and access all your pieces – known as a common data environment (CDE). If there is a hole in this bucket or the pieces (information) do not reside in this bucket, it will negatively impact the end asset (the LEGO house). The embracing of BIM in its true form results in infrastructure that is economical, sustainable, intentional, smart, futuristic, and built to last.
If you could use a term or word to describe the role of BIM in the civil infrastructure industry, what would it be? Foundational.
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