From muddle to model

No matter how hard they squint at traditional building plans, the Mecklenburg County code inspectors are bound to miss something.

That’s because for more than a century, turning in building plans to government code-enforcement employees meant flooding inspectors with paper, two-dimensional renderings that come from all tiers of contractors and subcontractors. Thus, the typical pre-construction plan inspection requires laying those renderings on top of one another and trying to spot code violations or design problems before they go from tiny specks on paper to real-life pipes and valves and connections at a construction site.

And, in real life, the problems often don’t show up until the inspector walks through after construction is finished.

Jim Bartl says he thinks there is a better way.

The director of code enforcement for Mecklenburg County, Bartl is so busy that he often sounds weary in an interview, for which he apologizes. But when he starts talking about a system called building information modeling, which goes by the inelegant acronym BIM, his voice brims with excitement.

That’s because his department is collaborating with Carolinas HealthCare System on an experiment to see if, by using BIM in the pre-construction phase, both the builder and the inspectors can resolve code violations before they are built into walls and ceilings and floors.

The Carolinas Healthcare System is planning a 30,000-square-foot building for emergency care and a parking garage in the Morrocroft neighborhood of south Charlotte. Bartl’s inspectors will scour (and perhaps not squint so much at) the BIM presentation CHS is preparing.

BIM presents, on a computer screen, a three-dimensional model that combines all project information. Instead of laying plumbing plans over electrical plans, as in the past, inspectors can see the plans in a single interactive file, thus allowing them a much more realistic look at the project.

If the collaboration succeeds in streamlining the code-inspection process and eliminating costly post-construction changes the contractor normally must make, Bartl said BIM inspecting could change how code enforcement departments operate and could subtract some of that weariness from his voice.

“In talking with other code officials around the country, we don’t know of another authority working in the owner’s BIM model, or working … with the customer’s team to experiment with how BIM will impact permitting and inspection service,” Bartl said.

The traditional system, Bartl said, has been in place since right after the Civil War.

More recently, Bartl’s department has encouraged digital renderings to reduce paper in the office, but those digital plans are still reviewed in much the same way as paper.

In his CHS experiment, Bartl will look at the model at the same time as the owner and contractors, adding another set of eyes in the planning stages. The goal is to reduce changes in the field.

Builders and contractors have been using BIM for about five years, according to Tim Ledgerwood, assistant vice president of CHS’s Facilities Management Group.

A McGraw-Hill construction study found the percentage of contractors using BIM was 5 percent in 2007. In 2009, that had grown to 45 percent. About half of building contractors now use the technology, and 20 percent of non-users plan to adopt it within the next two years, the study found.

For Ledgerwood, the greatest asset of BIM is that it eliminates waste. He said post-construction changes, required after the inspector walks through, are the building industry’s biggest waste of both time and money.

Bartl said that BIM has great potential to reduce changes in the field because inspectors can spot the problems on the model.

He told a story about a Lincoln County hospital that CHS worked on, similar to the current project. Using traditional modeling, Bartl said that a project like that would usually incur thousands of changes throughout construction and inspection. But CHS used BIM on the hospital.

“And you had, what was it, four changes?” Bartl asked Ledgerwood.

“Yeah.”

“And that’s not a small hospital,” Bartl said. “That’s the kind of difference we’re talking about.”

He estimated that for every hour inspectors spend reviewing BIM, they will save “three or four hours” in post-construction inspections.

The Mecklenburg County project is what CHS calls a health care pavilion. Work is set to begin by the end of this year on the $28 million project, with the hospital opening in the first quarter of 2014.

Russell Davidson, vice president of the American Institute of Architects, said he realizes the value of using BIM as a collaborative tool between the public and private sector. He goes so far as to predict it will be common in the future.

“I don’t know if (Mecklenburg County is) the first to do it, but I would say that this is cutting edge,” Davidson said. “This is something that is on the horizon.”

Bartl explained: “What I thought was that if we could work on (the experiment) together … (CHS) would get the benefit of us working inside his model the same way his contractor, architect and engineers work, as opposed to somebody on the outside just waiting for it to be built and then say ‘Oh, that’s wrong.’ We would get the benefit of operating inside the model and learning how it works and how it impacts our process.”

Bartl said the experiment is also important because he’s unsure of how it will affect his department if BIM becomes a standard way to enforce codes.

“I firmly believe (BIM is) going to hit us, and I can either be ready for it or I’ll be in difficult shape,” he said. “We don’t know anything about BIM. Well, we know the concept, but we don’t know practically how it will impact us.”

Even though BIM is expected to streamline the inspection process, Bartl said there won’t be any jobs cut from his department when BIM becomes the industry standard. If that happens, inspectors will just spend more time inspecting the models, rather than scrutinizing in the field.

John Benisch, vice president of the American Association of Code Enforcement, said he thinks having code enforcement involved from the beginning is a no-brainer.

“It has a huge benefit on everyone who is involved in it,” he said. “You take care of problems before they become problems. It’s so much easier to deal with them in plan review than it is in the field.”

Bartl said there are two reasons his department hadn’t previously tried such an experiment. First, he said, the technology only recently caught up with the idea. Before, he said, the BIM files were too large and too difficult to navigate for widespread use.

The other reason: There had to be an owner willing to get involved with such an experiment.

BIM is revolutionary software, Ledgerwood said, and he predicts that 80 percent of the industry will be using BIM within the next five years. He added that CHS requires that all its projects be done using BIM.

Bill Stricker of Carolinas Associated General Contractors said it won’t be too long before BIM is the industry standard. He does, however, predict large companies like CHS will lead the charge.

At first, he said, some of the smaller contractors may be at a disadvantage if they find the technology price prohibitive.

Stricker said that won’t last long though, because, like everything else, the technology will become much cheaper as it becomes more widespread.

Bartl has witnessed the evolution.

“When I was first practicing architecture (1980), we placed one (2-D) drawing over another, trying to find areas that clashed. It was crude,” he said. “We intuitively know (BIM) will save us time – there’s no doubt in my mind.”