Build Magazine September 2015

Build Magazine 13 Inside the Industry Mr.Tune from coBuilder UK shed more light on the topic by adding “Through our BIM enabled software we allow the construction industry to create, distribute and use the essential data or DNA of each building or in- frastructure, so all actors in the supply chain are able to access the accurate information (data) they require, when they require it.” coBuilder UK is a sister company of the Norwegian-based coBuilder AS – a software company that has been long evolving around the BIM domain going all the way back to 1997. They say, their mission is to support manufacturers in sharing their product data in all BIM formats and help contractors in the collection and distribution of ‘as built’ product data with their supply chains and clients. The company is an international member of buildingSMART and relies heavily on openBIM standards to develop their software tools and solutions. In the early summer, the company entered the UK market, engaging some of UK’s largest construction product manufacturers and contractors with trials of their prod- uct portfolio. The company works with open standards such as the buildingSMART Data Dictionary (bSDD) – which is a mapping tool for semantically defining technical terms in the construction industry. By using the bSDD it is possible for supply chains to understand different naming conventions regardless of language and to be able to freely and effectively exchange product data in common formats and based on a common technical language. Since its launch on the British market in the beginning of the summer, the company has been pushing heavily to attract some of the largest contractors and manufacturers in the UK. “We are working with coBuilder to see how we can improve the collection and sharing of data with our supply chain partners, so that we can validate that what we have built actually meets our design specifications.”, said Neil Thompson of Balfour Beatty.