BIM + Lean + Green

I feel fortunate to be living in an era when there are Computers, iPhones, iPads, Androids, Google Glasses, Google Earth, Facebook, Twitter and Broad Sustainable Construction. All but the last one out of my list are pretty obvious and I do not feel explaining why they are awesome.   However, I feel like talking a lot about Broad Sustainable Construction, a company which is based out of China and doing miracle after miracle and revolutionizing what world calls development. As a matter of fact, China is doing great with several other things too. But this blog won’t be talking about that. At this very moment (January 5 th 2013) Broad Sustainable Construction is building world’s tallest building – Sky City –1, which is almost a kilometer high (838 m/2749 ft to be precise) with 220 floors. They are set to complete the construction of this building within 90 days. This is remarkable and revolutionary. They claim to prefabricate 95% of building off site. Guess what, whole world is t...

With much hype about building information modeling (BIM) in last 5-6 years, now (2012) industry has arrived at a point where BIM is in every AECO professional’s dictionary. BIM is not only a fancy world in these professional’s dictionaries but they are using it for various advantages over their non-BIM using competitors. A recent example is the use of building information modeling at at Panama Canal Expansion . It’s all good that BIM is in use and its adoption is increasing exponentially. The question posed to the industry geeks is what is the future of BIM? Well, here is my take on the future of BIM- 1. We will move from 2D display Views to 3D-non-immersive Viewing User interfaces can improve task performance by exploiting the powerful human capabilities for spatial cognition. 3D displays support cognitive spatial abilities. Moving from 2D displays to 3D display will be the next main stream evolution of BIM.   2. We will further move from 3D-Non-imersive viewin...

A 30 story, 17,000 square meter hotel - T-30 is built in 15 days in Changsha, China. Building foundation was laid ahead of superstructure construction and superstructure was built with prefabricated components. These ultra fast construction schedule was only made possible with the help of prefabrication technologies. Prefabrication is changing the way buildings are constructed.    It will be interesting to look at the level of coordination and collaboration needed for this sort of perfection. Tools like Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Last Planner System (LPS) become even more important for achieving this level of perfection in coordination. Making sure that each component fits on site as intended and functions as designed would be only possible with 3D coordination and 4D schedule visualization. Coordination in fabrication facilities will be efficient with the application of Last Planner System. Moreover, effective supply chain management during construction wil...

Information overflow is a reality in all walks of life these days. Gone are the days when email communication was blessing for business. We live in an era of information overflow whether it be our Inbox or a social network site. We literally skim through all the information we see and try to keep up with overwhelming sea of information. I don't want to say that information technology is not a blessing anymore but I want to point out the need for intelligent systems (software and hardware specifically) to manage the information for us and also interpret this information based on our preferences and behavior. The intelligent systems that provide us with just enough information when we need it and where we need it. Companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook are doing awesome job of understanding user behavior and writing algorithms to accomplish the same goal of relevant information delivery to right people at right time and at right place. Mostly, these companies are tar...

Vijay Govindarajan recently caught attention for his recent book "The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge" published by Harvard Business Review and his work on " Designing $300 Home ". He is called the strategic innovation Guru and he is also the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at Dartmouth’s Tuck School in US. He believes that perspiration is more important than innovation i.e. execution of an idea is more important than only coming up with the idea itself. I will try to explain the advantages of BIM, Lean, Green and IPD by his theory of strategic inovation. He talks about three boxes that large organizations operate into (or where organizations' projects fall into)- Building Lean and Green using BIM and IPD fall under Box-2 and Box-3 that is selectively forgetting the past practices and creating the future (and here we are talking about 20 years from now i.e. about 2030). Hear is his talk with Harvard Bus...