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Issue Date: April 2002

Making the switch

April 2002

“Every time I speak to users and prospective users, the success of the Bentley mission becomes clearer and clearer to me”, says Tex van Deventer, managing director of Bentley Systems South Africa. “It is not so much our applications because there are many applications out there. It is the integrated solution we bring to the table. In architecture for instance, it is our ability to go from site works, through complete 3D design with photo-realistic rendering and bills of material, all the way to managing the asset with our series of ActiveAsset tools.”

To illustrate one facet of the design approach Bentley interviewed Gary Koah, National IT Director for Jacobs Facilities, a division of Jacobs Engineering Group. Jacobs Facilities provides engineering and design/build services for a wide clientele that includes 32 core clients. Koah oversees the use of over 1000 seats of MicroStation, and is currently implementing MicroStation TriForma on a project-by-project basis.
B: Do you have a set of guidelines, or principles, that govern how you adopt new technology?
GK: At Jacobs, we are relatively aggressive in our pursuit of new technologies, but we do not want to go down a road and realise we are headed in the wrong direction. That would be shortsighted. We are a relationship-based company. We have core clients that have been with us for a long time. Doing something very radical, quickly, just so we could say we were doing something, is very unappealing to us.
B: You are now introducing MicroStation TriForma to Jacobs Facilities. How are you managing the process?
GK: We started with our Washington DC office almost two years ago, completely deploying MicroStation TriForma onto our workstations before we introduced it to our teams. Certain teams started using it first, based on their projects. No one is kept away from the software; it is just a matter of teams seizing the opportunity to use the software based on their projects. We are now using the same approach in our other offices. We slide the technology in and then introduce its use on specific projects.
B: What benefits were you looking for when you decided to implement MicroStation TriForma?
GK: We went back to our client surveys. We saw some immediate benefits in making the switch from 2D to 3D. I did an analysis on a set of drawings. I took a 200-sheet set of drawings and found just one element in the plotted sheets and then found how many times that element was represented electronically in different contexts. It was drawn 116 times! We were spending too much time coordinating drawings - we were drawing too much. We were drawing just to coordinate, just to understand how the building went together. That needed to be fixed. We knew we needed to make a fundamental shift to 3D.
B: What is it about 3D design that appeals to you?
GK: The great thing about 3D design is the inherent coordination available to us in the single building model. We anticipated it would be beneficial, but we did not foresee how powerful it would be for us. We can now have two designers working inside a single building model. The coordination of their work is inherent because there are no redundancies, no duplication of elements. Both designers are working on single elements. As two or more people work on the single model, the decision-making process that happens inside the single building model, the dynamic of two engineers working inside the model, is really revolutionary when compared with the way it was before.
B: You could not do that in 2D?
GK: In 2D, we could reference together different drawings, but we did not have quite enough information to make a decision on the spot. Rarely did you have two people referencing 2D CAD files together and in realtime, checking to see how their two systems would interact, and immediately making a decision. Instead, we would plot out the drawings, have a meeting and then decide what was best. That process introduces more people, more time, more revisions and more markups.
B: You said, "The context of the drawing is going to have to change to be viable in the online space." Is the new context you envision 3D and the single building model?
GK: I see the 2D drawing as one of the necessary representations of the single building model, for certain purposes. For moving information through certain chains in this industry, 2D and paper is the viable solution. But that drawing can be generated from a query to the single building model.
We used Bentley's Interference Manager on our second big model-centric project. Using it helped us to open the door to different methodologies and contexts for the model. We were able to ask questions of the model. The same thing is true of using Bentley's Enterprise Navigator application. We can ask questions, "Show me this, in this representation." Until now, reviewing, checking or validating information meant going to the drawings, because they were the only graphical representation of the building. But in most cases that is not what reviewers want to do.
When we review a building design, we have a checklist. It does not say "go to the first floor plan and check and check this." It says, "Make sure the structural system is coordinated with the mechanical system." That is a systems question, not any specific drawing. Now we can do a review of the two systems, online, and ask questions of the model. We can ask it to appear in different contexts for different reasons.
B: Only a small percentage of firms are working this way right now. What are the obstacles? Is it bandwidth, processor speed, or something more fundamental?
GK: I think the limitation right now is in our professional practices. The idea of, "This is how we have always done things" is the real problem. We have got to get beyond that kind of thinking. When we do, then we may find ourselves testing the available bandwidth or processor speeds, but I am not going to say that those things are the limiting factors today. We have to move beyond the mentality that stops at sending out the drawings for review. Sometimes we are too tolerant of existing systems.
B: You are starting to use Viecon; how is that going?
GK: Originally it was our idea to use Viecon Project Hosting as a pure end-to-end collaboration environment, but we need ties to the back office. So we are using ProjectWise as the back office solution. We want Viecon to be our external face to the back-office environment. What we are waiting for now is the integration that will bring Viecon and ProjectWise together. We understand now that the new release of ProjectWise-Version 3.2-includes synchronisation with Viecon Project Hosting, so we are anxious to put it to work. We are structuring our deployment strategy to match Bentley's deployment strategy, so that it all dovetails.
Bentley Systems South Africa
011 462 5811


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