When the UK government announced its plans to make BIM mandatory for all publicly funded construction projects from 2016, the acronym surely passed most businesses in the forestry and timber industries by. What relevance, after all, does Building Information Modelling have for these sectors – indeed what does the phrase actually mean?
To answer this and to confront the many other BIMrelated questions that are certain to impact on current forestry and timber processing and manufacturing practices, Edinburgh Napier University’s Forest Products Research Institute (FPRI) ran a half-day seminar at the end of November to introduce the subject to an industry as yet largely unaware of the potential challenges and hazards ahead.
Fundamentally, BIM is about making construction more efficient and less wasteful of materials and energy: in other words, more sustainable. The UK Cabinet Office BIM Task Group has defined BIM as "a managed approach to the collection and exploitation of information across a project. At its heart is a computer-generated model containing all graphical and tabular information about the design, construction and operation of the asset".
More simply, BIM involves the creation and development of a digital three-dimensional representation of the physical and functional characteristics of a structure by all members of the supply chain. This computer model becomes a shared knowledge resource that evolves with the project from its earliest conceptual stages right through to completion and beyond, into the life cycle of the structure.
Consistent format
The important thing for the timber industry to understand is that to remain part of the supply chain, the information it provides in future on its material and products not only needs to be in the databases for BIM, it also needs to be consistent in format with information on other materials for it to be specified at all. If full data on a product isn’t there by 2016, any future sales to the construction industry could be imperilled.
To better explain the challenges facing the timber industry, Robert Klaschka of London-based Studio Klaschka Architecture + Design opened the session with "What is BIM? Why do I need to know about it?" and took the audience through the design and specification process from an architect’s perspective and, in the course of doing so, introduced some of the things the industry needs to do to ensure its products are considered from the earliest stages of a building’s design.
The key message here is that while there is widespread accord throughout the construction industry that BIM will dramatically change construction techniques, there is little definitive agreement on what exactly these changes will involve or how manufacturers of building components should respond. Manufacturers therefore need to come up with solutions to enable the industry to move forward and, although some will undoubtedly be ready for the 2016 digital BIM switchover, it is fair to say that the timber industry has a great deal of work to do to get itself into the same position.
That BIM will require significant rethinking – and reconfiguring – of conventional processes was made abundantly clear by Brian Murphy of GreenSpec who, in a talk entitled "CAD, XYZ, BIM, LCA, SPEC: from alphabet soup bowl to Holy Grail", demonstrated just how complex and confusing – in a sea of acronyms and contradictory standards – the specification process can be. The presentation was something of a tour de force in showing what BIM is all about and how it can help in what he referred to as the "sustainability revolution". For those who want to learn more on everything from Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) that will affect the specification of their products in the future, www.greenspec.co.uk would seem a very good place to begin.
Professor Callum Hill, chair of Materials Science at Edinburgh Napier University’s Forest Products Research Institute, followed this with "the importance of BIM to the wood industry – how to incorporate environmental information", a talk that comprehensively demonstrated why acceptance of the need to create a low carbon built environment is so important and why the timber industry should and could lead in this area, especially in the face of some of the more questionable information available on the carbon benefits of materials produced by other industries.
Life Cycle Assesment data
How LCA data will be used, and how it could influence the construction industry was the subtitle to the talk by the UK’s first EPD verifier, Dr Andrew Norton of Renuables (www.renuables.co.uk) who underpinned the facts and figures delivered by previous speakers with an eloquent summary of what a wood product LCA actually looks like and what information is required in order to put it together.
His conclusions for the timber industry could not have been more clear: get the message right – wood is a positive benefit in terms of global warming potential (GWP); prepare the data and get the measurements right; and lobby hard with the facts – it’s a tough competitive world. A salutary message indeed, and one that FPRI will provide more support on for the industry in future seminars on the subject.
