You need to have a thorough understanding of BIM if you’re going to get Matthias Spiss talking. The world revolves around plans, databases, tables and links for Allreal’s BIM Team Leader. He has been learning all about the technology for as long as it has been around. By building the BIM team, he has also been instrumental in ensuring the technology is used throughout the company. That makes it even harder to believe it when Spiss says in Tyrolean dialect that he doesn’t talk about BIM any more. “I don’t need to hear any more. For us, it has become an integral part of our day jobs – in much the same way that CAD has become the norm in drawing.”

After all, Allreal’s own new build projects have all been managed with BIM since 2019. The benefits speak for themselves. Allreal already has all the BIM expertise it needs in-house, so there’s no need to contract anyone else externally. This minimises the number of parties and handovers involved and keeps quality management consistent – from the competition process led by the project development team to the reali-sation phase and the management of the finished property.

Plus, the company’s own BIM guidelines ensure that all planners and contractors are consistently on the same page when it comes to data. But that wasn’t always the case. “A lot of hard work has gone into this behind the scenes”, says Matthias Spiss. “Since there has never been one consistent standard for BIM models, we developed our own.” And all that hard work is truly paying off now. “Now that everyone sub-mits their data with the exact same structure for competitions, we can compare projects in a fair and auto-mated way. Plus, we can tick off all the basics efficiently.”

At the realisation stage, construction processes can be simulated and current progress can be compared against the schedule. We also have technology these days that we could only have dreamed of even just recently. For example, a drone can be used to check the wiring before a ceiling is concreted, with the three-dimensional images automatically being compared against the BIM model. This makes it possible to identify any mistakes before it’s too late to avoid high costs as a result. It’s no wonder that tablets and mon-itors are becoming more and more popular on building sites. And it seems likely that they’ll soon be re-placing the paper plans rather than being used alongside them.

Sustainable flagship project

As far as building plans and documentation are concerned, it’s extremely helpful for the products and building materials that have been used to be saved directly in the building model. This is especially true for buildings meeting high sustainability standards.

In Baar, Allreal is transforming the Baarermatte office building dating back to 1981 into a flagship project that’s leading the way on sustainability. For the construction and operation of this new build with more than 100 rental apartments and office space spanning around 6,400 square metres, an ambitious target of 6.0 kilograms of CO2 equivalents per square metre per year has been set. With this target in mind, the plan is to construct the building using as much untreated wood as possible. As a way of reducing the minimal use of concrete even further, some parts of the existing building are being given a second lease of life. As well as concrete supports, parts of the concrete ceilings are going to be reused as walls in the stairwells. BIM makes it possible to simulate, visualise and documents these transformation processes too.

Even though BIM is already an integral part of the process at Allreal, digitalisation in construction and planning is progressing at such a fast pace that there’s no danger of Matthias Spiss and his team getting bored any time soon.

BIM – or Building Information Modelling – is a three-dimensional digital modelling technique used for buildings that consists of individual elements. All kinds of information relating to the various life cycle phases of a building is assigned to these elements, including sizes, materials, colours, scheduling details and information on quality, sustainability, operation and maintenance. This information can go on to be analysed further or linked to external data.