The Royal Columbian Hospital Redevelopment Ph.2 project is a Design-Build project budget of $850M to build a new 350-bed acute care tower. Requirement to have digital asset data enabled EllisDon to review platforms and finalize, “dRofus” the leading planning and data management tool to build a digital twin of assets.
On RCH, we were searching for tools that could help us meet our client’s requirement in creating digital asset data that could be shared using open exchange standards among the parties involved in the project, including the design team, trades, and the FM Managers. dRofus, an open BIM standard platform, appeared promising. This was EllisDon's first implementation of dRofus on a project. We developed new workflows to fit within our traditional methods through the design and asset information collection stages and streamlined this process to make it efficient as we learned and made use of the centralized database to its fullest at every stage. As we progressed through training, all parties involved adopted it readily.
By considering dRofus and the combination of BIM open standards, we were able to develop an efficient workflow that is integrated into our traditional process and supports all parties involved by means of a centralized cloud platform from the design development stage through construction completion. The main challenge for EllisDon was to own and manage the dRofus database as a design-builder by integrating both design data geometry specification (DGS) information from consultants and asset data collection specification (DCS) from trade partners. The efficiency attained from a coordination perspective was having access to the most current cloud-based centralized data at all times, for everyone involved in the project, and that supports all industry standardized formats to integrate - as such IFC for model integration and COBie for operational data.
Having to input and update all the client’s requirements information into a centralized platform provided all our design-build teams with the latest and greatest information at all times. With the two-way exchange of information between the dRofus and Revit, design information was communicated to our clients alongside the submission of Room Data Sheets (RDS), where RDSs provided an overview of comparison between clients' requirements and the latest design information from Revit models of all the disciplines.
The efficiency of interdisciplinary coordination between architects and the engineering teams has been improved considerably compared to traditional methods and, with trade partners and construction management team having access to this up-to-date information, resolves major communication issues. Having all the teams refer to one source of true information helped all stakeholders to be on the same page to make the right decisions. Additionally, it allowed the QA/QC team to integrate their verification checklist of all items that went into a specific room on site. The process of uploading asset information from vendors is a simple straightforward workflow as the information is organized accordingly based on Omniclass classification. All these relevant information from the design models and the asset data as required by the client (DCS) are being transferred through CSV files based on COBie format, and with dRofus being an open API source, we were able to start working on developing an interlinking platform through which information and the pdf documents (O&M manuals, shop drawings and etc) can be transferred effortlessly.
