Bolstering its reputation as a game-changer in the Philippine real estate industry, DMCI Homes is investing in Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology to further enhance the aesthetics, quality and cost-efficiency of its product offerings.
The leading developer of resort-inspired residential condominium projects started adopting the BIM technology last year with the recently-launched Fairlane Residences in Pasig City as the first project to use the said innovation.
“Our initiative for BIM adoption is driven by our commitment to uphold the company’s culture of quality and excellence and in providing best value for our customers,” disclosed DMCI Homes Vice President for Design and Engineering Adrian Calimbas.
Initially called as virtual building, BIM was first developed in Hungary in the early ‘80s. BIM is a process of creating information models containing both graphical and non-graphical information in a shared digital workspace containing a facility’s specifications, quantities, and program. It was only in 1992 that the term building information modeling was coined.
In the traditional process of design and construction, conflict in the building’s design, particularly in the mechanical, electrical and plumbing aspects, often gets detected in the middle of the project’s construction phase. These clashes consequently affect the construction timeline, quality, costs, and delivery of the project. But with the use of BIM technology, Calimbas said that they can lessen, if not eradicate errors in the design and construction, making it more cost-efficient for the company.
“We aim to develop project models that would create a seamless coordination of the project design, with clashes or conflict being detected even prior to the start of the construction of the project,” said Calimbas.
He added “And with this kind of precision in details that can be produced with BIM, the adoption of the technology is beneficial both to the company since it is cost-efficient and to our customers as we can speed up our construction timeline and delivery without affecting the quality of our projects.”
To maximize the full potential of BIM technology, DMCI Homes created a team that would solely focus in developing design models. To date, the real estate firm has a total of 18 in-house trained BIM modelers for its upcoming projects.
Benneth Cancino, head of the BIM team of DMCI Homes, revealed that aside from coordination and clash detection, they are also working on the auto-generation of quantities of project models that would speed up the traditional process of quantification works for estimation.
“One of the advantages of BIM technology is you can create federated models (architectural, structural, MEPF or mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection) which can be accessed easily by project team members either in a local servers or cloud workspace. In the future, we aim that time and costs be embedded as well in the model so that we can generate the budget in a timely manner and produce a design with improved constructability in order to deliver the project in time and with quality,” disclosed Cancino.
With the company’s adoption of BIM technology, DMCI Homes is all set to further improve the quality of its current product offerings and stay true to its mission of providing the best possible housing for the middle-income class, especially young families.
