What Difficulties Must Companies Overcome While Updating BIM Models?

Victor da Silvas, Project Manager, Skanska

The BIM model is valuable as it is a digital representation of a building's physical and functional infrastructures. 

The information incorporated into a building information modeling (BIM) workflow is useful and valuable. This concept can be applied to a new construction project or an existing structure. It is because a BIM model is a digital representation of a building's physical and functional features. 

The model is constantly changing as a shared, collaborative pool of information about a structure used as the basis for important decisions about design, construction, and operation.

The most crucial factor to accomplish success from any BMN projects is the regular and ongoing maintenance of the model. A BIM model must be updated frequently and consistently to cover the entire lifecycle of a building adequately.

Here are some of the common challenges a laser-scanning professional may face while upgrading models, along with some suggestions for addressing them, to achieve true BIM.

BIM education and training

There can be situations when the project requires upgrading the BIM model, but the companies do not have the skills in-house to do it. While outsourcing the job to a specialized third party is a convenient choice, integrating BIM more deeply into the company is a better long-term solution.

Proper training and education in the company will bring several changes, reflected internally with skilled people who are powered to develop and update BIM models and externally with their services. The company will be more efficient and successful as a result.

Overwhelmed by data

The volume of data collected over time adds to the complexity of a scanning project. When upgrading an existing building's BIM model, the ideal workflow will be able to figure and assemble incoming datasets rapidly and merge data from different sources.

That is the optimal situation. When upgrading a BIM model, the usual experience is sifting through a hard drive or other storage media where many datasets are stored and then manually inspecting a point cloud with dedicated software to find the exact section of the scan that needs extraction. It's too slow and inconvenient.