What are the five steps towards reaching ISO 19650 Accreditation?

ISO 19650 is an International suite of standards for managing information over the whole life cycle of a built asset using building information modelling (BIM).

Since the end of 2022, the construction industry experienced a shift in organisations investigating this standard and the accreditation process in more detail since the UK Accreditation Service, UKAS, announced the accreditation of three certification providers under this banner.

If you would like to know more about the ISO 19650 standard or you are ready to start moving towards certification, Daryn Fitz Principal Consultant and Special Projects Lead at Symetri, explains the 5 steps you need to follow in this short video: 

For more information, read of blog: 

https://www.symetri.co.uk/insights/blog/how-do-we-become-bim-iso-19650-2-accredited/

Or to book an appointment to discuss your company's journey, complete the form on this page https://www.symetri.co.uk/campaigns/bim-surgery/

I need help defining a building project or organisation strategy with BIM Information Management

 

Client organisations are increasingly employing Information Managers to support their capital investment projects and protect their interests. This is achieved with a well-defined protocol for recording, storing, disseminating and destroying data.

So, if you are a client asset owner organisation starting a new project or an architect who has been asked to provide BIM information management services directly to a client, but need assistance, watch this video to see how Symetri can support you:

If you would like support from Symetri, explore Symetri’s range of BIM Information Management Services: https://www.symetri.co.uk/buildings-infrastructure/buildings-infrastructure-consultancy/bim-advisory/iso-19650-accreditation-and-certification/#Services

AutoCAD training courses “Can I put the area of a room in a table?”

 As an Application Specialist with over 25 years of training Autodesk applications, I have recently noticed there has been a growing interest from delegates attending SYMETRI’s AutoCAD training courses to advance their skills with AutoCAD Beyond the Basics and the AutoCAD Advanced courses.

Why are more learners attending more advanced course?

Over the past months, I asked my students why there has been an increased interest in more advanced AutoCAD training courses.

The most common answers, is that their company has reached a plateau, the safe known workflows are not efficient anymore, many CAD drafting staff have retired and the time has come to refresh and reskill to advance the business to the next level.

I discovered the group dynamic to be extremely exciting in the Beyond the Basics and Advanced course, as I notice long time CAD users look at new features and workflows to adapt and apply to their needs in the design office. Our follow-on courses are very much a hands-on skill building experience.

“Can I put the area of a room in a table”

During these more advanced training courses, I tend to describe features that will streamline a workflow. For example, when I trained a group of delegates from the world of space planning, where they asked: “Can I put the area of a room in a table?” The answer being “yes”, allows us to discover the workflow to achieve this goal.

 First, we looked at the boundary command.

We then picked a point inside a room using the Object type as Polyline.

This created a closed polyline bounding one of the rooms. There is an entry which shows the Area and Length in the properties under Geometry. Using that information, we can populate given cells in a table.

Over in Paper Space we created a simple table to display Room Name, Room Perimeter and Room Area. In that table, we double clicked on the data cell under Room Perimeter and selected field in the Data menu.

Select object on the left field names in the field dialogue box, and then select the polyline. You can select the polyline model line even when you are in Paper Space.

We need Length to describe our room perimeter and Decimal for format.

In Additional Format we used a conversion factor of 0.001 to convert our millimetres unit size to meters for our table entry.

This gave us a value that represented Metres in Length for the perimeter of the room or boundary that we created. This value is dynamic so if you change the boundary, it will update the table field value.

Use the same procedure to extract the area value from the polyline and put in the table.

AutoCAD Training courses

We offer a wide range of AutoCAD Training courses, please visit our website for more information: https://www.symetri.co.uk/training/autocad-training-courses

AutoCAD Essentials - This course covers the essential core topics for working with the AutoCAD software, starting with a few basic tools expanding to more advanced ones. Find out more: https://www.symetri.co.uk/training/training-courses/autocad-essentials

AutoCAD Beyond the Basics - This 2-day course will help you explore more advanced tools and techniques to help you work smarter. Explore the full course content here: https://www.symetri.co.uk/training/training-courses/autocad-beyond-the-basics

AutoCAD Advanced - Customising and managing AutoCAD to suit your design application is a great way to increase your productivity. This course teaches simple but powerful customisation techniques and advanced AutoCAD tools. Explore the full agenda here: https://www.symetri.co.uk/training/training-courses/autocad-advanced

Testimonial:

“The course has been really helpful, informative and enjoyable - often training can be boring but Geoff made it easy for us to understand and relevant to the work we are doing. I can't wait to utilize the skills I've learnt & am also looking to book the next course - only if Geoff is teaching!” Natalie W

Webinar Recording | Everything you need to know about BIM | ISO 19650 Certification

Through BIM (Building Information Management), we can manage the information of a built asset through its whole life cycle, from initial design all the way through to construction, maintenance, and finally de-commissioning.

Through collaboration between engineers, owners, architects, and contractors in a common data environment, information can seamlessly flow between these disciplines and offers huge benefits when following BIM practices.

Symetri work in partnership with LRQA (formally Lloyd’s Register) in the delivery of ISO 19650-2 Certification. This webinar covers the following:

·         What is BIM and why should you consider ISO 19650 certification?

·         Industry trends

·         Introduction to our partner LRQA (formally Lloyd's Register) and meet some of their assessors

·         What is involved in the certification process?

·         Extra requirements for organisations who are already certified

·         Training and support

Watch the webinar here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EF73JwrQwg

For further information, visit our website: https://www.symetri.co.uk/buildings-infrastructure/buildings-infrastructure-consultancy/bim-advisory/bim-level-2-accreditation-certification-iso-19650-2

 

 

Webinar recording | Introducing Symetri’s Modular BIM Training (including ISO 19650)

All those engaged in the delivery of a construction project, across the complete project life cycle, is now starting to appreciate the increasing importance of BIM | ISO 19650 and its value in improving supply chain collaboration and process efficiency. Therefore, keeping up to date with the latest workflows, processes and standards is essential.

We understand that one training course does not fit all due to the nature of each individual business, and the differences in where you are on your BIM journey. Therefore, Symetri can help your teams refresh and update their knowledge and understanding of BIM | ISO 19650 and Information Management through modular based learning. Our BIM expert and Principal Consultant, Daryn Fitz, has established over 26 modules to give you the flexibility and power to:

-          Configure your own content,

-          Develop your own training programmes for your employees,

-          Keep up to date with the very latest standards, methods, and processes,

-          Maximise knowledge retention and investment.

Watch this webinar recording, to see how our BIM training programme works, explore the 26 modules currently available, and book a meeting with us to customise your own BIM training course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYFHLNRNGZA

https://www.symetri.co.uk/campaigns/bim-surgery-build-your-training-programme

FEA Made Easy.

As a designer and Engineer you can spend a significant amount of your time trying to get original CAD data ready for FEA studies. This entails suppressing non-structural parts, supressing features like holes and bolted connections and in extreme cases remodelling.

This is particularly true for welded and bolted fabrications including sheet metal and structural frame type components. This is required to make the mesh process as smooth as possible whilst trying to keep element numbers sufficiently low to enable faster FEA run times.

Taking out geometry simplification and meshing can make the FEA process simple and easy to use allowing designers and engineers to adopt FEA in their workplace to make optimised and innovative products.

Altair SimSolid simulation technology for designers, engineers, and analysts eliminates geometry preparation and meshing: the two most time-consuming, expertise-extensive, and error-prone tasks performed in a conventional structural simulation.

Read how our customer Pentre Engineering has introduced SimSolid to their design process and is achieving super-fast structural analysis in their designs and what took them 3-4 days of effort is now reduced to a matter of hours.

Find out more about SimSolid for yourself and download a free trial.

ISO 19650 | Changes around Fire Regulations and what it may mean for our industry

 Something happened in the fire safety sector last year, which largely went unnoticed. In July 2020, the government published a new draft bill titled the “Building Safety Bill”. In this bill the government:

Proposed regulatory reform on the back of the report produced by Dame Judith Hackitt

Introduces new requirements in the building fire safety sector, potentially affecting owner-operators, contractors, architects, and specialists in fire engineering

Ensures the safety of people who occupy our buildings by improving the transparency of information.

Introduces accountability, making responsibility for managing safety risk throughout the design, construction, and occupation process of buildings clear. This includes the responsibility to provide information in a manner that can be reviewed and understood consistently.

This of course is the basis of good Information Management.   

The bill requires a “golden thread” of building information to be digitally created, stored and updated, and critically this needs to occur throughout the building life-cycle process, not just on completion. It is not the role of the bill to provide us with the configuration to meet this requirement, however, we expect we will see the development of British standards over the next year or two to provide this key missing piece of the jigsaw. Indeed, there is a notable standard in development, BS 8644, the “Digital Management of Fire Safety Information for Design, Construction, Handover, and Emergency Response. Code of practice”. We have not seen this standard yet, but we expect it to outline the way digital information should be collated and handled. We also expect it to reference the information management and exchange standards we have got used to with “BIM Level 2” or “BIM Certification” as defined within the ISO 19650 standard. I am expecting the standard to become available to us in the latter part of 2021, so it is a good one to keep an eye out for.

ISO 19650 already provides us with a structured business framework for digital information management, and a lot of organisations have already changed their internal configuration to align with it. This includes quality management procedures to meet the requirements that are now regularly deployed on projects that utilise this standard to form the information handover requirements. Symetrioffers a gap analysis services which help you identify areas of improvement, allowing organisations to put task plans together with the aim of improving their business practices to meet ISO 19650 needs. Organisations have also started to look at technologies to deliver the information digitally including using Building Information Models (BIM) as their source of data for the production of fire protection systems drawings, specification, and performance analysis. We have been working closely with solution providers such Briab over in Sweden, who provide very innovative tools that allow architects and fire safety engineers to start producing their documentation in this way. We are already running several exciting proofs of concept with our customer base.

While of course, we cannot make a statement to say this will make organisations compliant without fully documented future requirements, improving business processes and technical solutions in this way can only be a step in the right direction in my opinion. While the Building Safety Bill may well be the push that is needed, there is plenty of opportunities for organisations to improve beyond simply meeting regulatory requirements. By producing information within the BIM process, a well-established and understood technique elsewhere in the construction industry, we can of course take advantage of the capability to coordinate and analyse much more efficiently using connected data than we have been able to previously. This makes us more competitive in our marketplace.