A new scheme to validate and certify companies’ ability to use BIM – likely to be used by clients and Tier 1 contractors in their supply chain selection criteria – is being discussed by industry stakeholders led by BuildingSMART UK.
Now run by BRE, the BIM standard setting group is in early talks with other organisations including RIBA and LABC on creating a scheme that would become a licence to build with BIM.
Nick Tune, head of BuildingSMART UK, told CM: “BIM validation would be like a competent persons’ scheme, it would certify that your company is able to manage data in a BIM environment.”
Asked if the industry needed another certification scheme, he said: “We don’t want to do anything the industry doesn’t want or need. If everything is done properly without the need for it, that’s great. But if there’s a need for it, we’ll certainly look at it.”
Nick Tune
Benedict Wallbank, a BIM consultant at SmartBIM Solutions, agreed that a BIM validation process would potentially be useful to main contractors and their suppliers.
“I believe it’s a possibility, although it’s quite early in the process. But I already work with a contractor that is talking about banding its supply chain sub-contractors into three different levels of BIM validity, and then selecting [for projects] on the basis of their BIM ability. The implication is, if their existing supply chain can’t do what they want, they will go to those who can.”
Nick Tune was speaking at the official event to launch BRE’s custodianship of BuildingSMART. The membership organisation for software vendors, construction companies and industry bodies aims to develop the open standards, protocols, product data and tools required for the interoperable use of BIM software.
It will be chaired by Mark Bew, chairman of the government’s BIM Working Group, and is now expected to become more visible and vocal in the BIM landscape.
One of its main aims is developing IFC protocols, code that would sit inside each piece of BIM software and allow data generated in that program to be exported to another IFC-enabled package without any loss of accuracy.
Market-leading software vendors such as Autodesk and Bentley have so far only partially endorsed the IFC schema. But at the event, Bew told the audience that two major software vendors had given the revamped organisation “fantastic commitment”.
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