How BIMcollab adds value in property and construction consultancy for McBains

McBains is a self-contained, highly experienced property and construction consultancy located in London, UK. Established 230 years ago, they work within Architecture, Structures and Civil Engineer, MEP, Quantity Surveying, Project Management amongst other disciplines. The vision of the company is that simplicity and intelligence are effective partners. They believe that simplicity provides the breathing space to think clearly, and clear thinking allows intelligence to be deployed more effectively. This translates well to their decision for the BIMcollab ecosystem for their day-to-day practice. 

Reasons for transitioning from traditional project coordination and delivery

McBains strives to always ‘Find The Better Way’ of managing and delivering projects. Prior to adopting BIMcollab, they did not have an automated process in place to manage clashes and issues across design disciplines. These were coordinated visually and using native software such as Revit, which did the task at hand but proved to be manual and inefficient in terms of tracking and automating a workflow. 

The collaborative aspect of BIMcollab

A company at the level of McBains needs to always take care of the quality service level. Devan Mistry, Associate Director and Strategic BIM Lead at the company, emphasized that they will always try to offer an end-to-end solution for design schemes with their Architectural, Structural/Civil, and MEP disciplines to ensure consistency, a high level of collaboration, and dedication to the cause. For this McBains has also integrated BIMcollab into every user of the Revit platform.

The road to BIMcollab  

Having had previous experience with BIMcollab Nexus and Zoom, Associate Director of BIM and Digital, Devan Mistry, opted to implement a coherent and efficient method of clash coordination and resolution, along with model checking. 

They dived right into using BIMcollab Nexus and Zoom simultaneously on their new office project. As this was a McBain’s internal scheme, it allowed for quick implementation and adoption by the design teams.

The journey has been a smooth one so far and has really helped set the bar for our company for model validation and coordination. On the back of this work, we have started rolling out this process on a wide range of other projects.

Easy implementation of BIMcollab

McBains now uses BIMcollab Zoom to initially review and audit BIM models to subsequently automate clash tests between design portions. These are then linked to BIMcollab Nexus for ease of access for the project teams and to widen the reach of information. 

Devan sees automated Clash Management with Smart Issues and Analyzing models with Smart Views as the main features that help the company save time and of course, money by creating rulesets for clashes between disciplines that can simply be updated fortnightly at the click of a button. 

Smart Views are a powerful form of data and model validation; elements can be filtered and highlighted against certain parameters and values. These can be saved as company modelling standards and used to very quickly check for objects which are on the incorrect level or workset for example. As well as the geometrical aspect, McBains have started using this function to check model compliance against COBie properties and Uniclass classifications. 

McBains’ process is formal on each scheme, through cyclical stages from upload to clash resolution workshops to reviewing and resolving the issues within the BIM models and subsequently starting at the testing stage again.High level reporting is also conducted between Devan and Project Directors to ensure each scheme is on track for delivering various stages and outputs; this is in the form of progress reports. 

The solution BIMcollab delivered

• The key issue was collaboration and true, live communication – BIMcollab has allowed McBains to manage this workflow seamlessly. 
• BIMcollab acts as a single source of truth on the status of clashes and issues which in turn has removed the need for manual emails, comments, and spreadsheets. 
• Overall, it has ensured that project team members communicate clearly and openly about their projects, regardless of what stage they are in and how inconsistent they believe their modelling quality is.

Property of McBains

Main Benefits for project teams

For teams working on McBains’ BIMcollab environment, the benefits are extensive:

For us, the combination of BIMcollab Nexus and Zoom is very powerful as it allows our project teams to coordinate design items from any RIBA Workstage. Everything from early concept designs through to technical design and construction; it is simply a user-intuitive method to layer issues and clashes periodically to align with the programme and the levels of detail we are working to.

Through BIMcollab Zoom, McBains has fully integrated model viewing, validating and clash detection capabilities into the issue management workflow. Zoom is their perfect tool for discussing live issues in coordination workshops and helps them quickly analyse issues to discover the optimum solutions, efficiently.

All quotes are by Devan Mistry – Associate Director (Strategic BIM Lead)