The Future of School Infrastructure Starts with Construction Quality Management

Using Construction Document Management to Achieve Cost and Quality Goals

Victor Cabezas, Tyréns Business and Service Developer, and Michael Thydell, External BIM Strategy Advisor for SISAB, partnered to reduce costs in institutional development. With the old way of doing things, each new school building was costing more than before.

This is where the idea for the BIM Future School Starter Package, a digital model concept that enables reuse of the best technical and spatial solutions that SISAB has developed during many years of design, production, and management of school properties, came from.

Powered by BIM 360, the BIM Future School Starter Package makes it possible to quickly and cost-effectively roll out new schools with only minor adaptations and adjustments based on local needs and design variants.

To provide both cost-effective and high-quality facilities, together SISAB and Tyréns set clear goals to:

• Reduce design costs
• Reduce the number of errors
• Increase quality

“When we were done with the pilot, we wanted to have a model ready for customisation, and we wanted it to be better and cost less for SISAB, not more.”

–Victor Cabezas, Tyréns Business and Service Developer

Achieved Data Standardisation using BIM 360 for Cloud-based Construction Management

Before partnering with Autodesk, SISAB was not using standard design coordination and collaboration platform, which led to delays. Tyréns worked closely with SISAB stakeholders to understand the benefits of using BIM 360 to manage collaboration. Ultimately, the starter kit files were created in Revit and then moved into BIM 360 for collaboration.

With project files available inside BIM 360, file viewers no longer need to have a Revit license. As SISAB and Tyréns moved into the construction of the pilot project, this became more important. Stakeholders at SISAB were able to be more intimately involved in the project. They could look at the models and create issues.

SISAB and Tyréns learned to reduce errors and ensure quality delivery by aligning all project stakeholders early in the process. BIM 360 replaced coordination meetings, saving two hours a week over five months, resulting in 50 hours in time savings. Tyréns’ innovation product called IFC-validator automated the process for quality assurance of the IFC files, resulting in more than 150 hours in time savings.

They also reduced the time spent downloading and uploading files and reduced the number of errors to be corrected during construction.

This Partnership Became a Model for the Country

Cabezas believes that this is only the starting point and that the industry’s future lies in creating new business models to reduce costs and increase quality using Autodesk Construction Cloud.

“There are still construction and design companies that are thinking in terms of billing more hours to customers, rather than thinking about what’s in the customer’s best interests. This is the wrong way to go about it, especially because customers are expecting greater efficiency and higher quality on increasingly complex jobs.”

–Victor Cabezas, Tyréns Business and Service Developer