Hawkins\Brown, an award-winning architectural practice with offices globally, implemented Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro and Autodesk Docs to enhance BIM collaboration across their locations. The project's goals were to improve user workflows, understanding of architectural requirements, and clash coordination with other consultants' models. By leveraging Diatec's support and training, they achieved significant improvements in project templates, model coordination, and information exchange compared to traditional methods. Hawkins\Brown is delighted with the results and plans to further integrate BIM Collaborate Pro and other leading technologies in their 12-month technology adoption plan, aiming for seamless design development within the design team.
About Hawkins Brown
Hawkins\Brown is an internationally renowned award-winning architectural practice, and one of the leading design-based architectural practices in the UK.
Hawkins\Brown have offices in London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Los Angeles and employ over 280 members of staff.
Customer Challenge
Hawkins\Brown made the decision to implement BIM within the practice 8 years ago. This required extensive investment and adoption within the practice grew at pace. Hawkins\Brown decided to utilise Autodesk Revit as its core tool and as their BIM workflows became more established, projects became larger and more complex, and the need to collaborate across the globe they sought further efficiencies and therefore began the adoption of BIM Collaborate Pro.
Project Goals
The primary goals of the project were to improve BIM Collaboration across Hawkins\Brown’s 5 office locations, enhance user workflows, improve understanding of the Architectural requirements, and provide employees with the ability to clash/coordinate with other consultants’ models in a more efficient manner.
Solutions
Hawkins\Brown began the implementation of Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro (BIM 360 Design) in April 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdown.
Jonathan Reinhardt from Diatec facilitated Model Coordination workshops, outlining how Hawkins\Brown could manage the live models to suit their needs and demonstrated the recommended Autodesk solution. Diatec provided workflow training services and continues to deliver maintenance, technical support and remote training as required. Currently, about 20 Revit projects are hosted on Autodesk Construction Cloud / BIM 360 through BIM Collaborate Pro with plans to have more projects in the cloud soon.
Business Outcomes
By focusing on the adoption of specific areas within the ACC suite (project templates, reviews, design collaboration and model coordination) and by utilising the services of Diatec for training and support, Hawkins/Brown have seen improvements in all areas as anticipated when compared to traditional server-based projects.
ACC project templates allows the creation of ACC projects with minimal input from users who typically manage projects, namely BIM Coordinators/Managers. Once the project template is applied, project members need to be added with a pre-determined role specified at account admin level, inheriting appropriate permissions. They then, adjust and apply naming convention codes for the project and upload model/files to the relevant folders.
Model Coordination takes the usual non-integrated coordination workflow and fully automates the process without the need of conventional file uploads, issues, deadlines, and email communications. ACC Model Coordination is fully integrated with ACC Docs, as well as traditional clash detection tools such as Navisworks for a complete and professional clash detection result.
Information exchange is automated through ACC Reviews and ACC Design Collaboration with minimal input from users. Files and models go through a stringent document control set of parameters embedded in these workflows and only shared and made available to the wider design team when approved by an assigned member of the team relevant to that approval workflow.
All in all, ACC has done away with the most tedious tasks of outmoded project set-ups, information exchange and model coordination workflows and it has simplified these so project members can minimise overall project risks and timeframes, and thus, concentrate on what matters the most to their specific roles for a given project.
Conclusion:
Hawkins\Brown are very happy with the results the adoption of BIM Collaborate Pro has delivered for their Revit Collaboration processes.
Recently Hawkins\Brown, Diatec and Autodesk took part in a Digital Innovation Workshop in HB’s London office. This has now led to a 12-month technology adoption plan, which includes further adoption of BIM Collaborate Pro, amongst other industry leading technologies.
Hawkins\Brown look forward to the development of more integration of modelling within the design team to allow seamless design development.
Products used: Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro & Autodesk Docs.
