Simplify your BIM Management Tools

We’re going to talk about BIM tools but first let me start by saying I LOVE EXCEL! – ok, now I can begin…

Traditionally our industry has been pretty good at defining design and construction project requirements …but then along came #BIM… 😜

Now, with BIM, it’s possible to truly integrate many downstream steps in our design and construction workflows – here are just a few:

How we use BIM Tools in BIM Management workflows

Let’s think about how we use BIM tools to:

Generate Quantities,
Connect Specifications,
Update Schedules/Programmes,
Support Design Approvals,
Streamline Procurement,
Manage Building Assets… to name a few!

Are word, excel, schedules and PDFs BIM Management Tools?

Unfortunately some teams still expect good results when using office management tools to plan BIM management workflows.

Word, Excel and Gantt Charts are great tools for general office tasks but unfortunately they have not been designed to plan, track and control BIM workflows.

Let’s take a deeper look:

Using Microsoft Word for BIM Execution Plans can promote a dangerous copy+paste approach – resulting in extensive 100+ page untargeted + static documents – many share that the impact tends to be limited use and poor adoption.

Using spreadsheets for BIM Scoping is unfortunately disconnected from the important and visually-rich LOD BIM standards. Using an excel-type approach teams have to cross-reference between definitions – taking extra time and increasing the likelihood of errors and miscommunication.

Using disconnected scheduling tools (like Microsoft Project) to plan the sequence of tasks is… well, disconnected. After agreeing on project scope teams seemingly restart the planning workflow again from scratch. Ouch.

Emailing PDF versions around for approval causes a build up of large batches of standards and processes that never seem to get officially reviewed, approved and included in contracts.

If these don’t help, what should the right BIM Management Tool do?

We believe that a dedicated BIM planning tool should:

Integrate the best features from traditional tools (Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Project, Trello, PDFs, etc),
Leverage the latest technology (cloud, collaboration, speed, access anywhere, etc),
AND be simple to use.

Over the last couple of years our team has been focussed on optimizing the BIM planning workflow – making it easy, integrated and valuable!

LOD Planner has built 3 integrated BIM Management modules:

The Plan Module allows you to create the fastest and most collaborative BIM Execution Plan ever.
The Scope Module allows flexible and visual BIM scoping to easily communicate the right BIM development for your project BIM Uses.
The Flow Module jumpstarts the execution of your BIM workflow – using the already agreed scope – to plan the optimum sequence of tasks and track what’s actually getting done.