BIM-SA is a not-for-profit entity, established to support the construction industry in the adoption of BIM and Digital Engineering in South Australia. Director of Digital Node, Rebecca De Cicco acts as the chair for this group supporting industry in this region in the knowledge and upskill of BIM according to ISO 19650. 

For Rebecca and the BIM SA 2020 events, the impacts of COVID has seen tremendous challenges in hosting face to face events and as a result Rebecca and the team took some of their events online, where they could share insight into the state of BIM in this region as well as deliver more focused presentations covering topics of interest. 

However not all in-person events were stopped, as in August the team host a roundtable event with participants across all sectors of construction in South Australia, as well as hosting the final end of year event which was (although smaller than usual) a good chance to finally have some further much neede face to face networking and engagement across our industry.

As much as this event was much smaller than usual, the team were able to bring together a diverse and informed speaker list with representatives from local and international companies all interested and engaged in BIM and Digital Engineering across all of Australia. 

This event started with a summary piece of the state of BIM in SA based on BIM SA research, presented by Rebecca, this summary detailed some of the information the team had collated in terms of the surveys sent out across the year, and feedback from the above mentioned roundtable event.

The findings have proven to be insightful and some of the information shared included: 

  1. There is no consistent understanding of BIM or Digital Engineering in SA and we have to focus our attention on the education and upskilling here more locally either via industry or through government. 
  2. Although many technologies are being used to support BIM and DE processes locally, there is no consistent delivery of these processes, nor is there alignment toward ISO 19650. 
  3. There is a lack of leadership across government when it comes to digital construction and asset management with disjointed processes and groups collating information in a paper based way. 
  4. Contractual obligations are generally neglected when it comes to BIM and there must be an understanding by all appointed parties on what is required of them contractually in terms of ensuring their information models align to their traditional deliverables (e.g. drawings and specifications). 

Although much of the research undertaken broadly summarised the above, there is much more to share and Rebecca will be publishing an industry report some time in the first quarter of 2021 summarising findings and providing insight to industry in South Australia. 

The event also included a presentation by Adam Freer, Manager for technical services for infrastructure for SMEC in SA and WA and he gave an insightful presentation on the implementation of digital across SMEC and some of the processes and challenges they have encountered as a business. 

This presentation was well received with Adam discussing a realistic picture of implementing digital across a business and where companies should focus their attention. Adam’s summary included methodologies around a company focusing on setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based objectives (SMART) to ensure that the people in your business are constantly developing their skills to support project work. He was very practical in his approach discussing that the people across a business are crucial to the implementation and to ensure that there are specific people working on projects with the correct skills and resources. This is something very important to BIM SA and it works very closely to educate businesses and people in the work it does and therefore very much agree with many of Adam’s points. 

The event concluded with a panel session hosted by Rebecca, and aimed to bring in speakers from across industry, consulting and education as well as maintain a diverse group to support the work BIM SA does with Women in BIM on a global Scale. 

The panel included key speakers across South Australia, Elisabeth Mitchell from Architectus, Sam Harley from Aurecon, John Gelder from the University of South Australia, and Eleni Khoury from Mossop Construction. As a panel it was an exciting session where the speakers discussed openly and honestly about the impact of COVID across their businesses. As much as they have all been affected and impacted by the pandemic, a key takeaway was how positive some of the remote, digitally focused incentives have been to enable industry to work more collaboratively. 

This panel was open, honest and very clear on how many incentives across industry to support remote working, digital process and data delivery can all be achieved regardless of where we reside and ensuring consistency in delivery of that information is key to the success of any BIM or Digital enabled project. 

Well done to the entire BIM-SA team for the event and a special thanks goes to Nicole De Cicco for organising the event and bringing us all together. A fantastic turnout and we at Digital Node look forward to 2021 where we can begin to host more BIM SA face to face events across our network.

For more details on BIM SA, visit their website at bim-sa.com.au.