Digitalizing the Construction Industry with Building Information Modeling (BIM)

Building information modeling—or BIM—is a collaborative process that is changing the way construction projects are planned, built, and operated. Within the commercial real estate industry, it creates the perfect foundation for building a Digital Twin.

On this episode of the Next Generation Design podcast, our host Greg Arnot welcomes Thomas Reimann, Innovation Technology and Sustainability Expert at Siemens Real Estate and Derek England, NX Product Manager at Siemens Digital Industry Software to discuss integrating the BIM model with shop floor layout.

In this episode, you will learn more about the power of collaboration with BIM, how Siemens Commercial Real Estate incorporates Digital Twin technology, and what we can look forward to seeing in the future with regards to integrating virtual reality into the BIM workflow.

What you’ll learn in this episode of the Next Generation Design podcast:

• How Siemens Commercial Real Estate utilizes BIM (03:44)
• An overview of the BIM and shop floor design and collaboration workflow (06:10)
• The challenges that have arisen connecting the two worlds (07:25)
• BIM and CAD each have their own pros and cons (13:07)
• How Siemens Digital Industries Software tools are supporting SRE’s workflow (18:56)

You can always listen to the Next Generation Design podcast right here, or wherever you do podcasts.

Read the summary or watch the video version of this episode: How Siemens Real Estate leverages digital twin technology | CAD software for building information modeling (BIM)

Listen to or read the next episode of the Next Generation Design podcast: Sustainable Design with Nexpirit and Phoenix Contact

Listen to or read the previous episode of the Next Generation Design podcast: Voyaging to the Moon: Rocket Design with Firefly Aerospace

We think that BIM, from the real estate perspective, is the perfect foundation for building a twin. By saying that, we made BIM mandatory for all new constructions that may come. Not only that, we try to leverage the digital twin and the BIM data throughout the operational phase of the buildings as well.

Thomas Reimann, Innovation Technology and Sustainability Expert, Siemens Real Estate

Connect with Derek England:

• LinkedIn

Connect with Thomas Reimann:

• LinkedIn

Connect with Greg Arnot: 

• LinkedIn

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Podcast Transcript for Digitalizing the Construction Industry with Building Information Modeling (BIM)

Thomas Reimann: BIM is, from the real estate perspective, the perfect foundation for building a twin. We made BIM mandatory for all new constructions that may come. Not only that, we try to leverage the digital twin and the BIM data throughout the operational phase of the buildings as well. For those who are familiar with the real estate domain, they know that is quite a challenge that we face here. But all that led us to where we are today, in collaboration with DI now.

Greg Arnot: I’m Greg Arnot, and joining us on today’s episode is Thomas Reimann, Innovation Technology and Sustainability Expert at Siemens Real Estate, and Derek England, NX Product Manager at Siemens Digital Industry Software. Before we begin, let’s meet our guests. Thomas, would you like to go first? Please tell our listeners a bit about yourself and what happens at Siemens Real Estate. 

Thomas Reimann: Thanks, Greg. What a lot of people don’t know is that Siemens Real Estate is one of the world’s leading corporate real estate managements. We care for all owned and rented spaces that house Siemens, no matter if it’s an office, a factory, a whole campus, or even now a city district like we planned and realized in Berlin, Siemensstadt Square. But what differentiates us from all the other in-house corporate real estate management is that we are not a simple cost center. We have our own profit and loss responsibility. 

Greg Arnot: Can you explain what that entails, exactly?

Thomas Reimann: What that means is that we need to care for ourselves. We need to refinance our spending, we need to pre-finance the spending on facilities for the business, and we need to contribute to the overall performance of Siemens. But not only that, we are constantly competing with the market. Being also part of a world-leading tech company, like Siemens being part of Team Siemens, digitalization and innovation are part of our DNA. We have everything on hand the others need; we have everything in our portfolio. So, we constantly try to drive new topics, be ahead of real estate trends, try new things, be Customer Zero, do things differently, dig into processes, and so on. We try to create together. 

Greg Arnot: How do you feel that sets Siemens real estate apart, especially in regards to Building Information Modeling or BIM?

Thomas Reimann: Siemens’ motto is to combine the real and the digital world with the burning topic of the industrial metaverse ahead of us and everywhere around. We think that BIM, from the real estate perspective, is the perfect foundation for building a twin. By saying that, we made BIM mandatory for all new constructions that may come. Not only that, we try to leverage the digital twin and the BIM data throughout the operational phase of the buildings as well. For those who are familiar with the real estate domain, they know that is quite a challenge that we face here, and all of us face currently. But all that led us to where we are today, in collaboration with DI now.

Greg Arnot: Thanks so much, Thomas. Can you also explain a bit about how Siemens real estate utilizes digital twin technology?

Thomas Reimann: Let me start with a digital twin example. Nanjing was a lighthouse project for Siemens back in the day; it was planned and simulated completely digitally. We combined factory data, shop floor data, performance data, and even building data to create a complete digital twin of the building, that gave it the name of Digital Natives Factory, and it won a manifold Siemens award back in 2022. But those who worked on the project could definitely relate to the analogy of the duck: on the surface, everything seemed to be calm, but underneath the water, we were constantly paddling to move the project forward and to meet deadlines. While Nanjing was a great success overall, we have been pretty clear that these processes were not scalable back then. Now, with the glocalization, a dozen of projects need to be planned simultaneously. So, we needed to get easier and more integrated processes. That is when Derek and I started to collaborate. Our goal was to significantly improve these processes and the collaboration and integration of BIM and shop floor data. 

Greg Arnot: Derek, you’ve also told me about your recent collaboration with Thomas to improve the process of integrating the BIM model with the shop floor layout. Can you please introduce yourself and give us a bit of an explainer on the way Siemens Digital Industries Software supports Siemens Real Estate and its customers? 

Derek England: Thanks for hosting, Greg. It’s great to be with you. As the NX Product Manager for AEC and BIM, it’s my responsibility to support our NX customers in this space and ensure that NX is the best design tool for this industry. I’m passionate about working with our customers and understanding where we can improve design and collaboration processes. About a year ago, Thomas reached out to Siemens Digital Industries in order to establish the connection between BIM files and shop floor planning to create a digital twin. This immediately piqued my interest, and I was eager to engage with Siemens Real Estate. I’m excited to be with you today, sharing the best practices that we developed together.

Greg Arnot: Well, that’s very exciting stuff! Thomas, Derek, let’s dig in and hear about what the two of you have been up to. Thomas, can you give us an overview of the BIM and shop floor design and collaboration workflow?

Thomas Reimann: Although the BIM and the mechanical CAD worlds are integrated together for design reviews, these two worlds have their own independent design processes, tools, and so on. SRE owns the BIM data due to digital operations, like I said. So, we keep the data up to date with the help of our external facility managers. The shop floor equipment and shop floor planning are owned by the engineers. Therefore, architects do not reposition shop floor equipment, and engineers do not reposition walls or columns. So, the BIM data needs to be continually refreshed and up to date to perform frequent design reviews, alignments, and so on. Once the BIM data is imported into NX, equipment gets positioned relative to walls and columns. For example, a building’s production layout may include more than 500 pieces of equipment; we have soldering lines, manual assembly stations, robotic assemblies, and so on. We do all that to validate the layout and design fully digitally in 3D for the first time. 

Greg Arnot: And have you run into any challenges when connecting these two worlds?

Thomas Theimann: When there is a change needed, for example, on the architectural side, so the architect may shift a wall, then the model needs to be handed over again. The engineer needs to review the changes, be aware of the changes, and adapt the shop floor layout accordingly; then, the updated shop floor design again needs to be transferred to the architectural side, and the new requirements on infrastructure need to be adapted. So, architects typically use for working with BIM files, Navisworks or Revit, for example, so the data needs to be imported into the tools. We get the shop floor in the open IFC format. We import that data as a single component into Revit. And then, with the NX data on hand in Revit, we try to resolve any issues or collisions between the shop floor equipment and the column, for example. Ideally, these design reviews take place weekly or even daily, if feasible. So, a vision would be that there is a constant reflection of the shop floor in the BIM world, and vice versa; there is constant reflection up to date in the NX world. That would be my wish. But speaking of the past, for Nanjing, for example, these reviews have taken place regularly, but the effort was quite high. So, we needed to first export the BIM data into IFC, import that data again in NX, then we needed to optimize the model, reduce the details, and so on. So, every review and every milestone was a brand-new study on its own. So, we definitely needed a more efficient way of importing data into NX. 

Greg Arnot: Thank you, Thomas, for that overview of the design collaboration workflow. Thomas, Derek, I’m wondering, can you tell me some of the hurdles you’ve experienced with the design process? And how do you ensure that the proper requirements are being validated?

Thomas Reimann: This type of early design analysis is difficult because both worlds are not connected; they are kind of disconnected. Some years ago, the design and planning were even done only in 2D. Tools vary, and file formats are not compatible with each other. And then you have the architect and the engineer maybe having different understandings by talking about the same thing. So, you need several iterations to narrow down to a common conclusion. Even by trying this, there might be an issue or a clash that’s undiscovered, and then, in the end, only a workaround can solve it. So, it was pretty clear to us that there must be a better way of doing this. At the very early beginning of a project, everything starts with a demand clarification. The shop floor engineers provide an early understanding of what they need. For example, floor size or manufacturing floor size, ceiling heights, or HVAC demands; these requirements get documented and clarified. With this early demand, we create a rough first BIM model of the building. This BIM model, at this very early stage with walls, columns, and first ceiling heights, gets handed over to the shop floor engineers, and they can immediately start at this early stage already to place objects on the shop floor to reserve spaces and clearance zones. These early placements can only be rough blocks that don’t necessarily need to be the final shop floor equipment. With this rough shop floor planning played back to the architect again, the shop floor and the building can be adapted to the demands again. With each iteration, you add more and more details on each side and get a better understanding of the demands. So, the models evolve from time to time.

Derek England: This workflow that Thomas described is similar to what I’ve seen other customers do. Lots of times, they’ll do a 2D shop floor layout. That’s really useful for early conceptual designs and enables you to quickly reposition things and evaluate different layout configurations in 2D. But as the design progresses, we need to also evolve the level of detail. One of the drivers to move to 3D layout was the ability to detect pipe issues. Sometimes we would find that equipment would interfere with beams or HVAC equipment. These wouldn’t be discovered until very late, resulting in last-minute changes and costly delays. The way I’ve seen it, typically, is once the shop floor layout is proposed, the architect will begin designing the facilities, and the engineers will begin positioning their equipment in the context of this building. In each domain, architects as well as engineers develop their designs independently from each other using their preferred tools and processes over time. So, when BIM is done, the machine layout is done intheir own tools. Companies like Siemens Real Estate must develop processes to enable the BIM and the mechanical CAD worlds to work together to create a complete digital twin. During the design process, regular design reviews ensure building components such as walls, columns, and beams don’t interfere or are too close to shop floor equipment. This BIM data is really a lot different than mechanical CAD tools. BIM CAD definitely has a structure in the form of relationships. But all that data is contained in a single part file, while mechanical CAD uses assemblies and components to create structure. 

Greg Arnot: Have you found one to be more beneficial than the other?

Derek England: Each has its own benefits. For example, with assemblies, you have the ability to have multiple designers collaborate simultaneously during product design. Because there are these differences in the way we structure BIM and mechanical CAD architecture, it was a little bit of a challenge: how do we bring these two worlds together? When you import BIM data into NX, what’s the best mechanism and method to import this data into mechanical CAD? BIM Data Import was one of the first topics that Siemens Real Estate and Siemens Digital Industries worked on together. Most of the AEC CAD tools like Revit, BricsCAD, MicroStation, Tekla, etc., collaborate using IFC as their preferred neutral file format for exchange. When importing AEC CAD or BIM CAD into NX, you have lots of different options. One option is to try to preserve the BIM structure as an assembly structure, or you can flatten the BIM structure into a single NX component, or you can import the BIM data as a precise boundary representation or lightweight facet data. I couldn’t make those decisions; what’s best for Siemens Real Estate. So, this is where I really needed to work closely with Thomas and his team to understand more about their workflow and their requirements.

Greg Arnot: I’m sure that close collaboration has been indispensable. Thomas, tell me, what are some of the challenges you’ve faced integrating the BIM and shopfloor data?

Thomas Reimann: I see mainly three challenges here. First of all, the data format. The interoperability is really challenging because BIM CAD and mechanical CAD data formats are so different. Speaking of IFC, all BIM CAD data is essentially stored in a single part file, as Derek said. NX, on the other hand, uses components and assemblies. BIM CAD workflows highly rely on BIM attributes for collaboration, so there was a need to preserve these attributes within NX. Then, the second challenge, I would call, is positioning. BIM CAD workflows rely on everyone designing around the same project coordinate system and base points. This project coordinate system is essential when aggregating data from multiple CAD systems together. The third challenge is the complexity, for sure, because we learned that NX translator options are set to generate the best quality data, but these best quality options did not provide the best output for what we need for BIM and shop floor collaboration. Trying to replicate the BIM structure within NX using assemblies added, for example, a lot of unnecessary complexity. Translating BIM CAD in NX assemblies with precise B-rep data resulted in very long translation times and very large data sets. We also needed to consider what BIM data is relevant for shop floor layout because, for example, details of a door or window are completely unnecessary or not add any value to the shop floor planning team.

Greg Arnot: Derek, are these challenges that Thomas has talked about similar to what you’ve seen in other industries?

Derek England: Collaboration between automotive and aerospace OEMs and their suppliers is so different than the way architects, general contractors, subcontractors, and owner-operators collaborate. When a project begins, the general contractor hires multiple subcontractors to design various design elements within the building, for example, steel structures, piping, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, fire safety systems, etc. The general contractor initially provides each subcontractor with an initial design context, and each discipline is designed independently. Each subcontractor has the flexibility to use their preferred design tool for their portion of the design. This initial design context becomes out of date really quickly. Each designer is essentially working within their own data silo. When the general contractor wants to review the entire design, the data from each subcontractor is aggregated into another software to find interferences and clashes. The software is really good at finding physical clashes and documenting interferences, but many requirements must be manually checked and validated. 

Greg Arnot: And would you mind walking us through that process?

Derek England: The general contractor prepares a document for each subcontractor notifying them of the changes that are required, and then each subcontractor goes off and makes the changes again, in isolation. So, the second design review can prove to be even more difficult than the first design review because now, you have to understand what’s changed from the first revision to the second revision. So, how can you tell what’s changed? You can compare body IDs and things like that. But did that body move? Or was it enlarged? It’s easy to detect what’s new or what’s been deleted, but it’s really difficult to see how things have changed. So, you spend a lot of time analyzing what’s changed. Without history or traceability, it’s really difficult to track these changes. Typically, the majority of time is spent just analyzing these revision changes. So, this process of validating and aggregating design is time-consuming and error-prone. Because the effort to aggregate and validate the data is so time-consuming, it’s difficult to plan for and make big design changes because then they have to understand how will these impact all the different disciplines? It’s difficult to make sure that these changes get propagated to all the disciplines properly, and that we can appropriately understand the impact of this change. Lots of times, these late changes will result in onsite issues and cause delays and additional costs.

Greg Arnot: That’s really interesting. How have you found that Siemens Digital Industries Software tools are supporting SRE’s workflow? Can you identify some of the challenges that you and Thomas have faced?

Derek England: When we translate data, if you look at the settings that we use, we want to get the highest quality and highest fidelity data possible; that’s the out-of-the-box settings. But what we found was when we use these best quality IFC translation options, it could take hours to complete, and it would create thousands and thousands of NX parts and gigabytes of data. Managing all these parts is challenging. If the engineers are managing this data in a tool like Teamcenter, then you have to import all this data there. It just was a lot of overhead to do that. The shop floor was surprised that items like doors or columns that were essentially all identical; when we imported them through IFC, they were surprised to find that they were not instances. In mechanical CAD, you would see that as an assembly instance. So, you just have one object that’s represented in multiple places, but when we came through IFC, each one was a unique one. So, that surprised them, too. But that’s one of the challenges of going through a neutral file format like IFC. One of the ways that we explained why that was challenging is, for instance, if you had a column going up a pitched roof, for example, that column is identical in its profile but the height could be different. Or if you’re getting a column from the same part family, it sees it as the same component in their authoring tool, but in NX, it’s a different shape or a different height. In NX, it can’t be an identical instance because it’s different in shape. While in the authoring system, it seems like it’s the same, in mechanical CAD, it’s not; it’s different. Because we can’t detect that, sometimes there are identical instances that are represented as unique assembly instances, and that surprised them. So, there was some learning that happened as we translated this data.

Greg Arnot: So, it seems obvious that translating and organizing BIM data for the shop floor has been challenging. Thomas, you mentioned earlier the importance of positioning when aggregating the data. What are the hurdles involved with positioning in these workflows?

Thomas Reimann: In the architectural domain, we usually define a common base point at the very beginning of each project. Due to its complexity, each domain, for example, structural design, electrical design, mechanical, plumbing, and so on, has its own model. There is a specialist for each domain and a special tool creating that layer and 3D planning. Our data environment needs to combine all these models into one holistic building model at the end. This only works because of the same base point every layer is aligned to.

Greg Arnot: And what about the technical issues discovered when positioning data?

Derek England: It’s difficult to design the shop floor and the building in isolation and then try to coordinate and position them relative to each other later. What we found best was to provide the shop floor with an early project point that we could design around. That made it very easy to aggregate the data later and pull it all together. Early on, we found some discrepancies when importing and exporting data via IFC using the default reference point options—like Revit, for example—and the position of the data seems inconsistent. This is when we discovered the importance of utilizing a defined reference point when we were exporting data from Revit to IFC. The default option was to use the internal origin as a reference point. But when importing IFC into NX, we were using the Absolute Zero option. The BIM CAD tools need to support lots of different types of base points and coordinate systems. We simply needed to make sure that the translators were using a common data point. We just recently found the best point to use. There’s a site coordinate point, and there’s a project coordinate point; which one works best for the design? So, those kind of decisions need to be made by the architects and the engineers. It doesn’t matter which one you use; you just want to use the one that’s most convenient. So, just need to go through that process of deciding which one is best in NX and these other tools that support that.

Greg Arnot: Derek, before we wrap up this podcast, I’m wondering if you can summarize the lessons you’ve learned collaborating with SRE.

Derek England: We did discover that there’s very little value in replicating the entire BIM structure as an NX assembly. It made it really complex to import this data into Teamcenter, and it really wasn’t a lot of value. For early collaboration workflow, the shop floor can use a single NX part file, where all the BIM objects are represented using lightweight facets. All those attributes that are associated with those objects are preserved and can be viewed in NX and in the architectural CAD tools. We also found that precise boundary representation wasn’t required. Using lightweight facets created a much smaller dataset, the translation times were faster, and they were plenty sufficient for positioning shop floor equipment. All the globally unique identification attributes are preserved. We saw examples where translating an IFC file could take hours to process. We saw one example where an IFC translation took over four hours to complete and created three-plus gigabytes of data. But doing that same IFC file using the lightweight options and creating a flattened structure took less than 10 minutes, and the overall file size was just 200 megabytes; that’s a significant difference. It’s much easier to manage a single 200-megabyte part file versus managing hundreds or thousands of individual parts that are three gigabytes or more of data. Finally, positioning and making sure that we coordinate multiple contractors using multiple BIM CAD tools. It’s really important that we have a common coordinate system that we’re all referencing when we’re exchanging data. Trying to align things after the fact was really difficult and really not efficient. So, as long as everyone’s designing around the same coordinate system, it worked out great.

Greg Arnot: That definitely makes sense. I’m curious, Thomas, where would you like to see advancements in your collaboration processes in the future?

Thomas Reimann: If I could wish for it, I’d love to interconnect both worlds. Having a permanently synced reflection of each other’s domain model in the respective tool, no manual effort anymore, no repetitive importing, no manual updating of models or conversations needed. As soon as there is a change, for example, on the building side, the engineer gets an indication that there is a change and options on how to adapt to these changes, fully automatically and fully digitally; that would be my wish. For a digital process addressing issues and communicating requests for changes, I would hope to see NX adapting to the BCF (BIM Collaboration Format) process that’s very well established in the architectural domain, and a lot of tools are already using this process because it’s an international standard. Then, for sure, VR. VR is a great tool; we use it now for visualization, simulation, collaboration, and visual decision-making in the project already, but it’s only at the start phase, and we hope that it evolves even more. Now, with the recent addition of Immersive Engineering, our collaboration with Sony, and the recently released headset, I see VR coming closer to the shop floor engineers as well. With Siemens heading towards the industrial Metaverse, simulation gets more and more important. So, I think you should be aware of the data and everything in the building domain as well because it’s housing your processes. It’s the home of your shop floor at the end. So, it should be taking part in consideration. But overall, I wish for this collaboration to continue, that we continue with the journey, that we can leverage our learnings, we can adapt, and we can drive this further because it makes sense. Who knows what we will see, maybe from the Metaverse campus in Erlangen.

Greg Arnot: Derek, what enhancements do you see in the near future that could benefit these workflows?

Derek England: I think you can see our investment in VR is continuing to accelerate. We’ve just started to explore with Siemens Real Estate and other customers how we can leverage VR and AR. I might be a little bit biased, but at the CES show, the Sony headset stole the show. It was a pretty big deal when the Siemens CEO talked about the Sony headset. It’s a really cool example of how you could use VR. So, the ability to perform design reviews in an immersive environment like that enables a new level of realism to ensure the owner-operator knows exactly what will be delivered. I also imagine we’ll continue to work on improved translations. Direct translations can offer additional benefits over IFC; for instance, by translating directly from Revit to NX, we can obtain more information about the BIM objects. So, it would be possible to identify identical doors, windows, beams, etc., during the translation, and then we can create components as instances, which was a shortcoming that we discovered before. This could really improve– finalize the project; if we want to manage this project long term, it’d be much better to have a cleaner assembly with assembly instances for components.

Greg Arnot: Are there any other areas you’re looking at as far as rapid enhancements?

Derek England: The other area might be performance; there’s going to be a push to include more and more detail within the model. So, we want to be able to support these massive design projects, which really require the CAD tools to be efficient and optimized for performance. Finally, collaboration — a simple interface that translates between disparate applications is not really ideal for contractors and owner-operators. As Thomas said, it would be great to have an immediate reflection of each shop floor and the building together and be able to see immediately when those changes occur. So, that’s an area that we’d really love to see the ability to really integrate those two worlds and create some kind of associativity between those two. So, NX’s architecture is geared for this collaboration and designing it. We really want to be able to design and develop a single source of truth within NX.

Greg Arnot: And finally, Derek, Thomas, can you tell me how you’ve involved sustainability as a part of your process?

Thomas Reimann: By designing first virtually before even starting to pour concrete, we try to make it right and to have a perfect fit on the first try. So, it’s optimizing the resources, not wasting any resources or energy, and more efficient. Keeping the model up to date during operation enables us to even reshape the shop floor in a digital way and even optimize these processes then by refurbishment, and so on. So, it is supporting the whole lifecycle of the building to be more efficient at the end, saving a lot of resources and contributing to sustainability.

Derek England: I’ve seen examples where they’re designing all in 2D, and then they went to install the equipment and found out that that equipment was so tall that it actually interfered with the HVAC ducts. So, they had to reroute those HVAC ducts that were basically essentially brand new. So, you eliminate scrap and things like that that occur with these kinds of late design changes that occur on site. Simply just ensuring that we avoid those last-minute changes avoiding those delays in construction, that also saves construction costs and resources of the construction process on site. Ensuring we have a good digital twin that’s accurate and we’re modeling to it improves sustainability a great deal.

Greg Arnot: Thank you so much to Thomas and Derek for joining us today; we hope to speak with you both again soon. Thanks also to our listeners for tuning in to today’s episode. Join us next time for more discussions about the latest in design innovation and software applications. I’m your host, Greg Arnot, and this has been Next Generation Design.