Balfour Beatty BIM director Peter Trebilcock and Asta Development managing director Jason Ruddle led the line up of speakers at the first of a series of Construction Manager live CPD events last week.
Speakers also included Dr Maxwell Mallia-Parfitt (pictured), a research fellow in the Design Innovation Research Centre at the University of Reading, who gave a presentation on the future of virtual and augmented reality for construction and gave a live demonstration of both.
Hosted at law firm Olswang’s central London offices, the day of CPD sessions was entitled: “The art of the possible in today’s construction sector”. The innovative event aimed to provide insight into the latest thinking across the industry on new technologies and processes.
Trebilcock, who is responsible for the implementation and development of BIM across Balfour Construction Services UK and leading the BIM Centre of Excellence team, presented on how to exploit digital technologies, focusing on BIM.
He expanded on a theme that “BIM has benefits for everyone”, with benefits that can be realised from BIM irrespective of project size, sector, whether it is a new build or refurbishment, procurement route, or client type.
The well-attended event was held at Olswang’s London offices
After outlining the benefits to different parties in the construction industry, Trebilcock set out Balfour Beatty’s vision “to change our business processes and harness and exploit the power of the digital tool set” and “to transform the business for the future”.
He also revealed the results of a survey conducted among staff running Balfour Beatty’s BIM-enabled schemes, which revealed that on all projects BIM had reduced risk, helped design coordination and aided clash detection.
He finished the CPD session by highlighting how BIM had positively impacted a host of Balfour Beatty projects, including Heathrow Terminal 2B and its £65.7m student accommodation project at Holyrood, Edinburgh.
Meanwhile, Asta’s Jason Ruddle gave a CPD presentation on linking design models to 4D and 5D project planning, and how it is revolutionising project scheduling.
Both CPD accredited presentations were filmed and will be added to Construction Manager‘s growing archive of online CPD modules, many of which are focused on BIM, here.
The audience of construction professionals raised a wide variety of topics which were discussed at the well-attended event, which also included presentations from CIOB senior vice president Chris Chivers on the management of complex contracts, Wienerberger’s technical manager Chris Hornby on multi-cellular clay block walling systems and Leeds Beckett University’s Professor Chris Gorse on the energy efficiency “performance gap” in completed buildings.
