BIMcollab Nexus really does promote actual cooperation

BIMcollab Nexus turned out to be an excellent tool for managing the issue management workflow. It helped us to centralize, filter, and thus to easily focus. It helped us to keep the speed in the project. Dutch software company AFAS is building a new head office: the AFAS Experience Centre will be 44,000 square meters. The new headquarters contains 750 workstations, a private theatre, a restaurant with 700 places and an atrium for events and exhibitions.

Outside there will be a park and several sports fields. Cars are parked in a two-story garage with 760 places.  Captain of industry and one of the AFAS founders Ton van der Veldt had his brother Steef van der Veldt design this spectacular new office building in ARCHICAD together with Just Architects. AFAS has a clear overall vision from the building to the workplaces. An inspiring and very involved client, up to the highes level.  Noteworthy is that the founder had his room moved to the other side of the current office building to have a clear sight on the huge building site across the street. 

The AFAS staff will enter their new office building as of January 2021. Employees and other interested parties can follow the progress of the construction (started in November 2017) via installed webcams on site.

Rob Duindam, director at Just Architects and Luc Nelis of EversPartners explain this unique BIM project. Just Architects was responsible for the design and Luc Nelis was appointed as responsible BIM director. Other partners were Valstar Simonis and Pieters Bouwtechniek.               

Rob Duindam: “AFAS is a progressive software company with a paperless policy and it wanted to work with the latest digital developments for the design and construction of the new head office. The client explicitly demanded that the project had to be carried out in BIM and wanted everything presented in 3D. We chose ARCHICAD and BIMx presenter as the BIM tools to do this.”

Creating a BIM-workflow for all stakeholders

Rob Duindam continues: “We searched for partners who were able to work according to BIM. Nowadays there is a lot of talk about BIM, but to use BIM teamwide is rare. Much is still to win in that area. Fortunately, we see through the various softwares available, that what you can get out of BIM is rapidly growing.”

Luc Nelis: “For this project we had the ambition to take a step forward in the domain of communication. To stop talking about non-relevant issues via endless spreadsheets and telling each other who should have done what. Because I already had a good experience with BIMcollab in another project, we were eager to work with it.”

Luc Nelis proceeds: “BIMcollab Nexus turned out to be an excellent tool for managing the issue management workflow. It helped us to centralize, filter, and thus to easily focus. In the AFAS boardroom BIMcollab was used to talk about the major issues. This was possible by Filter on priority, very easily. BIMcollab helped us to keep the speed in the project.

The ease of use of BIMcollab Nexus made the whole project team understand and work with it within five minutes. It’s as simple as that. Young, enthusiastic modelers do embrace this way of working and the integration of BIMcollab Nexus with other software packages works just perfect.”

“You have to do it together and get things done” 

BIMcollab Nexus truly promotes the cooperation between all parties and simplifies the communication. You are challenged to discuss the issues in detail. No more throwing over the fence.