BIM is Big – Meet the Winners of our 2nd Annual Public Sector CAD Awards
Achievements in building information modeling (BIM) ruled at the [acronym] 2nd annual Public Sector CAD Awards and Expo, held online at a unique virtual event. Hundreds of you turned out online to view the awards ceremony and attend and network with some of the CAD industry’s top speakers at a series of free educations sessions, including:
placed first in the state and local category, faced some unique challenges. With responsibility for overseeing correctional facilities at nine prisons and 25 community sites across the state, many of which date back to the 19th century, are overcrowded, or weren’t up to code.
Previous attempts to improve facilities had been met with mixed results. Correctional facilities are like small communities containing housing, food services, warehousing, medical clinic, armory, laundry, and more. Each requires highly specialized design knowledge. Department officials coordinate with the many different teams involved and provide overall direction for projects. No matter what the project, bringing that many people together to create a unified design presents challenges.
“What we found in the past was that so much information is generated in the design phase, but a lot of the detail and sometimes even the program intent was not carried through in the actual construction.” Mickel Edwards, Facilities Engineer with the Department.
In addition, once a building was turned over to the owner, the people charged with running the facilities did not always understand how systems worked because information had not been shared with the end user. For the next round of projects, IDOC was determined to find technical solutions to help resolve these communications issues.
Thanks to an injection of funding from the state, IDOC was able to secure approximately $300 million for infrastructure projects. One project alone—a new state maximum security penitentiary—was worth $130 million.
In an effort to correct past issues and with a goal to create a more sustainable and energy-efficient penitentiary, IDOC specified that all new projects be created using BIM. The impact of the implementation was broad and far-reaching resulting in a quality model that provided stakeholders with clearer understanding of projects and transparency into use of public funds, a healthier inmate environment, visualization of the facility before it was even built, and minimization of non-complaint work across design teams and construction partners. Facility staff will also be provided with a dynamic model that will provide operational and maintenance savings through the use of this new “100 year facility”. Read more about IDOC’s achievements (PDF), methodology and other benefits of BIM in their winning submission.
This solution provides and successfully demonstrated the following life cycle capabilities:
- Lynn Allen’s “60 AutoCAD Tips in 60 Minutes”
- What does it take to Implement 6 Million Square Feet of BIM? A Real Life Case Study
- Digital Design Tech, Trends and Talking Points for 2013 – A Q&A with Public Sector Industry Pros
- What’s New in Infrastructure and Planning Solutions for Government
- Clearing the Fog of Designing in the Cloud
placed first in the state and local category, faced some unique challenges. With responsibility for overseeing correctional facilities at nine prisons and 25 community sites across the state, many of which date back to the 19th century, are overcrowded, or weren’t up to code.
Previous attempts to improve facilities had been met with mixed results. Correctional facilities are like small communities containing housing, food services, warehousing, medical clinic, armory, laundry, and more. Each requires highly specialized design knowledge. Department officials coordinate with the many different teams involved and provide overall direction for projects. No matter what the project, bringing that many people together to create a unified design presents challenges.
“What we found in the past was that so much information is generated in the design phase, but a lot of the detail and sometimes even the program intent was not carried through in the actual construction.” Mickel Edwards, Facilities Engineer with the Department.
In addition, once a building was turned over to the owner, the people charged with running the facilities did not always understand how systems worked because information had not been shared with the end user. For the next round of projects, IDOC was determined to find technical solutions to help resolve these communications issues.
Thanks to an injection of funding from the state, IDOC was able to secure approximately $300 million for infrastructure projects. One project alone—a new state maximum security penitentiary—was worth $130 million.
In an effort to correct past issues and with a goal to create a more sustainable and energy-efficient penitentiary, IDOC specified that all new projects be created using BIM. The impact of the implementation was broad and far-reaching resulting in a quality model that provided stakeholders with clearer understanding of projects and transparency into use of public funds, a healthier inmate environment, visualization of the facility before it was even built, and minimization of non-complaint work across design teams and construction partners. Facility staff will also be provided with a dynamic model that will provide operational and maintenance savings through the use of this new “100 year facility”. Read more about IDOC’s achievements (PDF), methodology and other benefits of BIM in their winning submission.
BIM Technology Provides Solutions to Iowa Department of Correction Expansion Projects
Winner, Federal / Contractors Category – Suresh Neelapala, Senior Architect, Lockheed Martin / Federal Aviation Administration / NISC Program BIM won out again in the federal/contractors category. Congratulations to Suresh Neelapala and the winning team at the FAA National Airspace System (NAS) Integration Support Contract (NISC) team led by Lockheed Martin. NISC provides critical professional, technical, and planning assistance to FAA organizations supporting the existing NAS, as well as organizations tasked with the planning, development, and integration of Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) into the current NAS. FAA was interested in how BIM could benefit the agency and tasked the Lockheed-led NISC team led to deliver a proof of concept to demonstrate the lifecycle benefits of BIM. Inherent in this project was the need to create an integrated solution set to demonstrate the complete lifecycle benefits of Information Modeling (design to decommissioning). In addition, the solution had to integrate into existing FAA workflows since the FAA's Air Traffic Organization (ATO) does not have a system in place to effectively and efficiently manage facilities through the entire lifecycle. To demonstrate the BIM-based Facility Lifecycle Management capabilities to the FAA, in mid-2011 the NISC team developed a proof-of-concept project using an existing facility had an Airport Traffic Control Tower, Radar and Transmitter sites in mid-2011. The NISC team laser scanned the three sites, developed the BIM Model utilizing the scanned point cloud data, integrated the BIM model with facility management tools and GIS to develop a complete one–stop Facility Lifecycle Management solution. NISC successfully completed this project on schedule (five months) and within budget.
This solution provides and successfully demonstrated the following life cycle capabilities:
- Asset Management and Analysis
- Visual Inventorying/Assets Reconciliation
- Configuration Management
- Visualization for Work Orders
- Space Management and Analysis
- Emergency Service Request / Disaster Planning
- Energy Systems Analysis/ “Greening” Facilities
- Facility Condition Assessment
- Asset Life Safety Inspections
- First Runner-Up – Peggy Simpson, Engineering Technician, Great River Energy, Minnesota
- Second Runner-Up – Frank De Santo, Senior Civil Engineering Technician, Pasco County, Florida.
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