NBS BIM Toolkit: The Benefits

What are the benefits of the NBS BIM Toolkit? Here, Stephen Hamil, Director of Design and Innovation at NBS, outlines the three core advantages for Employers, project teams and the wider industry, with comment from John Eynon, Chair of the CIC’s South East Regional BIM Hub. 

“The BIM Toolkit will help put together Employers Information Requirements, aligning digital information requirements to the specific stages” explains Stephen. Design and construction teams will be able to clearly define who is doing what and when at each stage from the outset, whilst the industry will benefit from a ‘construction language’ defining information exchanges.

“I think it brings us something we’ve never had before” said John Eynon. “Up until now we’ve been so fragmented in the way we use information, that it’s been hopeless trying to get anything together, but now we’re getting a benchmark of consistency and practice”.

The Toolkit forms a key part of the UK Government BIM Task Group’s five year programme to deliver BIM Level 2. NBS successfully launched the beta version in April 2015 having won the Government’s competition to develop a free-to-use digital toolkit for BIM in September last year.

It features some powerful functionality for guiding beginners and experts alike through the BIM Level 2 process. A library of level of definition templates covers both LODs (Levels of Detail) and LOIs (Levels of Information) and is classified through the new unified classification system. In addition, the Digital Plan of Work (DPoW) tool gives project teams that ability to define roles and responsibilities clearly from the outset.

“This to me is where the plan comes together” concludes John. “We’ll all be working to the same menu, the same hymn sheet, working consistently toward a shared goal. I think it provides a platform for the industry to really move forward into a digital information economy, which is really where Level 3 is going”.

The BIM Toolkit was conceived by HM Government’s BIM Task Group and initially funded by Innovate UK. Development of the tool was led by the NBS team working in close partnership with BIM Academy, RICS, Microsoft, BDP, Mott MacDonald, Newcastle University and Laing O’Rourke. Further support was provided by APM, BIFM, CIBSE, CIOB, ICE, IStructE and RIBA.

Why not start now? You can create a project for free with the BIM Toolkit here: https://toolkit.thenbs.com

It is also easy to keep up to date with progress and implementation by following @TheNBS and the #BIMToolkit hashtag on Twitter.

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