Process, Case Study & a Red Kite: how SES is using BIM – Wednesday 1st March 17

Not our most succinct event title but three linked presentations covering a good number of the current BIM issues. Originally we had hoped that CIBSE would present on the new BIMHawk tool that has been developed but at fairly short notice they had to pull out of presenting. But never ones to let a little thing like losing a speaker thinkBIM called upon its fantastic network of BIM professionals and immediately plugged the gap with Nick Tune, CEO of CoBuilder in the UK.

However to start the evening it was great to get a presentation and live demonstration from Gavin Dunstan, BIM Operations Manager from our series sponsors SES Engineering Services. Gavin shared a great overview of how SES Engineering Services have adopted BIM to suit their requirements as well as how they have progressed to embed more and more digital workflows into their businesses as well as using these to collaborate with their customers on projects.

For some reason live demonstrations often turn into a fraught strategy for presentations – in theory why would anything go wrong with the software you use all the time but for some reason adding in an audience into the same room and the software always seems to make things a bit more risky!! However, with his colleague Richard driving the laptop, Gavin’s demonstration of Autodesk BIM360 ran smoothly.

As mentioned at the top of this post our second speaker was Nick Tune, CEO of CoBuilder UK and a great data enthusiast. Nick is always good value and opened with a great slide of a TV remote – and perhaps what we really need them to do – with the opening question ‘What data do you need?’

Nick went on to give the audience a great overview on how to define, procure and confirm data in the BIM process using COBie, PLQs, PDTs, PDS and the LEXiCON project with the BRE.

This month’s twilight seminar was chaired by the good friend of thinkBIM, regional chair of CIBSE and major CPD logger – Simon Owen from Calibre Search. As well as keeping everything to time and asking some great questions he has also created a great Storify of our event too which can be viewed at the link below.