On Thursday, April 11th, manufacturers and AEC professionals attended in the premises of Polantis to the first Specifiers’ Cocktail Party (co-organized with the Club Prescrire). Alessandra Peroni, Real Estate BIM Manager France at Bouygues Immobilier, presented a project. Meeting Minutes.
NE.ST : 12 000 m² in Courbevoie
Alessandra has presented the NE.ST operation.
While projects for the transformation and modernization of neighborhood buildings are multiplying, Bouygues Immobilier has launched – via its Rehagreen entity – the renovation of the building Axe Défense, rue Louis Blanc in Courbevoie, under the commercial name of Ne.St: NEw STate of Work, of Life and of Use.
NE.ST is the fruit of a reflection primarily oriented to the benefit of its occupants. Its virtuous transformation was an opportunity to restructure this building to new standards, and to provide it with technical equipment offering optimal energy performance.
What is planed to be:
- 12,300 m² of fully restructured offices
- 150 private parking spaces in the basement
- Up to 1100 employees / workstations
- 700 m² of garden and terrace on the ground floor
- Under-slab height from 2.65 to 2.70m
- 1270 m² of office trays
- Up to 15% meeting rooms
- 1200 m² of private gardens and terraces including a large rooftop with a panoramic view of La Défense.
Being BIM Manager at Bouygues Immobilier
Alessandra Peroni presents her strategic mission for the deployment of BIM in the Real Estate business and role of the BIM Manager, because today the responsibilities associated with this figure are not yet completely shared.
At Bouygues Immobilier, she specifies, the BIM Manager is not responsible for the coordination of studies or the synthesis of the projects. He provides technical and pedagogical support to all project stakeholders and is in charge of ensuring compliance with the specifications and the BIM convention.
Alessandra has taken on the role of BIM Manager on the Ne.St operation internally and, by detailing her experience, she presents all the actors of the project according to the modeling software used. The whole of the project manager modeled with Revit, apart from the architecture agency (163 Ateliers) who worked with the Allplan software. Bouygues Immobilier encouraging OpenBIM, Alessandra and the project teams composed with this complexity, which allowed to appreciate in direct the daily difficulties of this approach.
Supporting collaboration and gaining support through unifying tools
The main objective of Bouygues Immobilier was to « derisk » the operation thanks to the BIM, meaning having a more complete and better coordinated design so that – arrived in phase Business Consultation File (DCE) – the whole of the works is completely mastered.
The collaboration at Bouygues Immobilier is structured around IFC models thanks to two solutions: BIMSync and BIMGate.
BIMSync is a collaborative work platform integrating an IFC viewer and a BCF-based exchange that allows topics to be addressed to targeted project stakeholders. BIMsync also allows the transfer and retrieval of the geometry of the model and the use of compiled IFC as a basis for spatial coordination and studies.
BIMSync is a market solution that has been selected among others based on different pilot projects and employee feedback on ease of ownership and ergonomics of the interface.
BIMGate, a solution developed internally by Bouygues Immobilier’s IS, is a portal for the exploitation of data from the project’s digital models, which makes it possible to extract and compile the information contained in the models according to different logic so that they become meaningful for the operational teams of Bouygues Immobilier, who do not necessarily master the native modeling softwares. BIMGate is used to track the progress of the project, including the display of surfaces (administrative and useful) and design indicators.
Alessandra points out that BIMsync’s ownership of the project worked very well and as proof it shows the amount of exchanges that took place on the platform: over the duration of the design studies, 541 « subjects » were opened and they have almost all found an answer. Of these 541 questions, almost all came from the Study Coordination, which shows that BIMsync was used as a project management tool and a coordinator space for contributors.
Alessandra stresses the importance of this type of tool to trivialize the BIM, make it accessible and win the commitment to change.
Bouygues Immobilier is aware that it is necessary to clearly and concretely explain its objectives and cases of BIM use with its partners and to support a win-win approach in which everyone regains their interest in BIM.
Important changes with the BIM
Looking at the McLeamy Curve, we understand that with BIM moving the design effort upstream allows us to better control the real estate product and, potentially, the associated costs.
The risk, however, is that of going back into the details very early, without having decided on the main programmatic and technical lines, which leads to a distortion of the McLeamy curve by increasing the workload (instead of anticipating it) because of the time dedicated to the resumption of modeling. This necessarily leads to wasting energies.
Alessandra then notes that the BIM leads to restructure the design phases with a long phase devoted to the modeling / production of the digital model, ideally after the filing of the PC. This phase is the moment of presynthesis and spatial coordination.
She also specifies that a new approach to presynthesis is defined with BIM: presynthesis becomes embedded and it is spontaneously realized thanks to the very act of modeling in a context and a collaborative approach.
More and more, we realize that working in BIM means changing our traditional operation modes. Thus, Alessandra Peroni closed her presentation with a quote from Pascal Minault, President of Bouygues Immobilier, which supports the decompartmentalization of the company and its trades. In the same way, in order for Bouygues Immobilier’s BIM approach to work, it is necessary not only to appropriate tools, but also to support a change of mentality and culture which leads the project teams to collaborate better and in a more structured way.
« We need to decompartmentalize the company, our activities, our organizations and our modes of operation. […] We must work better together, between ourselves, with our clients, with our partners, be in the culture of « co »: co-designing, co-producing, co-hosting, co-financing. Eventually: collaborating. »
We suggest the following articles: