Part of the world-renowned Royal BAM group, top-tier civil and engineering company BAM UK and Ireland is known for delivering flagship construction projects. Whether creating or enriching buildings or infrastructure, it thinks beyond the build and focuses on the bigger impact.
When the firm won the build-only contract for Ireland’s new National Children’s Hospital (NCH) campus in 2016, it knew it could maximise impact through its partnership with Autodesk. The companies had built a productive relationship over several years of collaboration on digital transformation initiatives.
Designing and delivering a huge world-class hospital involves managing an extraordinary amount of data. Ireland’s new National Children’s Hospital (NCH) is a high-profile project and a complex challenge, as it brings three hospitals together into a single campus with room to grow.
Working closely with Autodesk, BAM adopted the latest building information modelling (BIM) platform technology seamlessly throughout the project, culminating in a world-class facility with a data-rich digital twin.
“It’s great to have a company like Autodesk behind you, supporting you whether it’s a strategic deployment of a product or a technical answer.”
Greg Byrne, DPS Business Partner, BAM Ireland and UK
Cutting through the complexity
Set in the middle of a dense urban area, NCH has 6,500 rooms including 22 operating theatres, 60 ICU spaces and 380 individual in-patient rooms.
Taking a holistic approach to healthcare, it also has overnight accommodation beds for parents and playgrounds on site. It also includes a third-level education centre, with lecture theatres, seminar rooms, collaboration spaces and a library for up to 2,500 students.
The complex project, split across five main areas, demands precise coordination among teams, including over 100 subcontractors. For Greg Byrne, establishing a common data environment (CDE) was vital. He knew it would improve collaboration and ensure access to accurate, up-to-date project data for all stakeholders.
Evolving with Autodesk
Since the start of the project, BAM has partnered with Autodesk for its CDE. Over the years, the teams have adopted the latest platform technology, moving from BIM360 Classic to BIM360 Next Gen and now Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) to ensure they always had state-of-the-art tools, workflows and connectivity. “The tools are getting simpler and easier all the time,” Greg explains.
And partnering with Autodesk has meant easy access to expertise and support. “Autodesk wants to make BAM’s use of its tools a success,” he adds. “It’s great to have a company like Autodesk behind you, supporting you whether it’s a strategic deployment of a product or a technical answer.”
The power of asset tagging
Tagging NCH’s assets – including each room – with QR codes helps BAM ensure everything is ready for handover in a comprehensive digital record for the client.
“There are a number of important tools in ACC,” says Arran Timms, project fitout manager – construction for the National Paediatric Hospital Development Board. “But from a client owner perspective, the assets module is the backbone of everything. By the time you get to the end of the job, it’s complete. It’s ready to go.”
From BAM’s perspective, asset tagging brings new levels of efficiency: team members can provide live feedback on any issue by scanning the room’s QR code. Sinead Rogan, BAM’s mechanical electrical plumbing (MEP) manager for NCH, describes it as “instant information at your fingertips – which is a game changer.”
“It’s an incredible building. What we’re going to be delivering to the children of Ireland is truly extraordinary.”
Arran Timms, project fitout manager – construction, National Paediatric Hospital Development Board.
Protecting sensitive environments
With a construction timeline spanning eight years, BAM finished sections of NCH long before handover. It must keep these areas safe and pristine – while construction work carries on around them.
BAM’s partnership with Autodesk presented a solution: Autodesk Tandem, newly developed cloud-based digital twin software. While piloting Tandem, BAM configured a digital twin to monitor temperature and humidity continuously in critical rooms housing IT infrastructure.
It installed water leak sensors to proactively detect any seepage, and added door sensors to track room access – ensuring server rooms remain secure and any unusual activity is logged.
Autodesk Tandem aggregates data from sensors and BMS systems, providing visual context with heatmaps overlaid on spaces and systems, as well as time-series charts with thresholds to give quick visual cues for data outside tolerance. Tandem lets BAM verify for the client that it is properly maintaining completed rooms, significantly reducing operational risk and avoiding expensive penalties.
An extraordinary future
Autodesk Tandem also enhances the project handover, enabling data, documents and links to be associated directly with assets in a 3D visual environment – bridging the gap between NCH’s construction and operations. Even without BIM expertise, owners and facility managers will have easy access to information in their Tandem digital twin.
As that handover approaches, the client is impressed with what BAM has accomplished – a state-of-the-art medical facility built for the future, with minimal disruption to its urban surrounds. As Arran says, “It’s an incredible building. What we’re going to be delivering to the children of Ireland is truly extraordinary.”
Looking beyond its NCH handover, BAM sees its partnership with Autodesk growing through new projects and new technologies. “Having an enterprise business agreement and partnership with Autodesk is important because it gives us a roadmap of what’s coming along and allows us to use cutting-edge tools,” says Greg.
“Software changes quickly, and you have to think about the long term. If you’re not with the right partner at the right time, you can miss opportunities. So, Autodesk’s future support is going to be critical.”
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