The need for change in the automotive industry has led North American auto makers to embrace technologies that allow them to work more efficiently and effectively. Laird Landis, senior technical engineer at General Motors, spoke at Autodesk World Press Days about his organization’s embrace of Building Information Modeling (BIM).
The organization first took the time to benchmark the benefits of BIM with a detailed and in-depth study, and then declared that all projects would have to be designed in 3D, with the goal to be 25% faster and cheaper.
The magnitude of this commitment and challenge is significant. General Motors is a global company with 170 facilities in 34 countries, and adds or retools a number of plants and facilities yearly. Given this scale, GM recognizes its ability to be an agent of change for the construction industry.
This 3D approach, along with a commitment of being green, were put into practice on the Lansing Delta Township Assembly Plant. The plant is LEED gold-certified, and the first in the world to receive any level of LEED certification. The adoption of BIM for this project resulted in significant cost reductions, and made it possible to build a 440,000 square foot facility within this plant in only nine months.
GM has made a commitment to being green that includes a goal of saving green space equal to the every facility size. They’re also saving energy and recycling rainwater. In the Lansing Delta Township Plant, they’ve reduced energy consumption by 250K kilowatts per year, which is enough to power 250 homes for one year.
Using BIM on any project is an investment in both technology and time by the entire design, fabrication, and construction supply chain. It’s also a multidisiciplinary collaboration that’s not only on the construction side of the equation, it also involves many agencies as well as the public and the press.
Construction workers are told to trust the model and build the model. The complete prototype of the building beforehand means that it is completely clash free. This is a major procedural change that brings the detailed knowledge of mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) into the model. This step alone saves thousands on clash detections in the field, and resulted in a 75% reduction in the number of fire protection collisions.
GM indicated that there are multiple benefits from adopting BIM:
- A quiet and organized construction site. Know when everything is coming and going leads to a very organized work environment.
- A quiet and organized construction site. Know when everything is coming and going leads to a very organized work environment.
- The modeling and clash detection prior to building leads to no changes during installation, which not only improves efficiency, it improves morale too.
- There is virtually no field overtime with the orchestrated construction made possible by BIM, which means considerable cost savings
The model-based approach also works to capture existing facilities. By using laser scanning to obtain information and get accurate, quicker and better information than in the past, the plant comes to the engineer instead of taking the engineer to the plant.
Overall, GM estimates that they are able to construct a building 25% faster, saving 10-15% of construction cost. And they can do this much safer than in the past, setting industry records on safety.
GM is focused on being an industry change agent, with plans to add a next layer of BIM complexity in future projects. They’re working now to capture manufacturing industry models for the pieces and parts that go into the building. By getting manufacturers to create 3D models with detailed information on their parts, they’ll be able to drag and drop elements into the model. They’ll also be able to take the information and use it in multiple inferences, such as maintenance.
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