BIM, Marketing and Roof Design – Three Events

I’ve recently been involved in three events that you might find of interest, two just passed and one to come. Today I’m blogging about the BIM4SMEs working group, and in the next few days I’ll write about the other two.

BIM for Small Business

If you work in the UK Construction industry, you probably work in an ‘SME’. In 2011 it was estimated that there are 360,000 SME’s in UK construction, nearly 80% of them ‘micro businesses’ with fewer than 10 employees.

On Monday I attended the launch of the BIM4SMEs working group.

BIM (Building Information Modelling) has been a popular topic for several years, and I’ve been to several events about it. The government published a UK BIM strategy in 2011 that famously required that all government funded projects ‘collaborative 3D BIM (with all project and asset information, documentation and data being electronic) on its projects by 2016.’

But often the question afterwards for me was ‘What’s this got to do with the small guys, and how is this going to work for them?’. As the information about BIM was confusing and disparate, it was difficult to see how the ‘small guys’ were going to make it work, unless they were lucky enough to have an enthusiast in their ranks.

The BIM4SMEs Working Group is the answer to that. Supported by the Cabinet Office, the government’s BIM Task Group and the Construction Industry Council, the working group is formed of people in SMEs with an interest in BIM, and their sole aim is to support SMEs to understand and implement BIM.

I produced a Live Blog of the launch, which included an appearance by Cabinet Office Minister Chloe Smith, but more importantly, presentations by people who are successfully working with BIM including a product company, two small contractors, two architects and a carbon consultant.

You can see the live blog here or view it below. I’ll be adding more presentations as they become available and its already full of links to useful information and people who can help you.

Read more about the working group and how you can get involved at the BIM4SMEs website, join their Linkedin group or talk to them on Twitter.

Next post will be about digital marketing in construction.

[UPDATE]

You can search an archive of all the twitter messages from the event. Thanks to Martin Hawksey for this tool.

You can view an interactive visualisation of the twitter activity. Click on a node to see all those person’s tweets and then click on ‘Replay Tweets’ to see the conversations over time.  Thanks to Martin Hawksey for this tool.

View the live blog as a slide show below or as a complete page here.