Home to the largest BIM project in the Southern Hemisphere

It’s not just the Hansen Yuncken team who are embracing the lessons learnt from the $1.85b new Royal Adelaide Hospital Project. BIM professionals across the globe are capitalising off one of the largest BIM case studies in the Southern Hemisphere!

Adelaide is home to the largest healthcare facility in Australia. When construction commenced in 2011, the project team adopted a strategy to become South Australia’s first ever project to be delivered using 3D and 4D BIM technology. Bringing in skilled professionals, the project team drove the adoption of BIM and quickly expanded the knowledge throughout the whole industry.

The new Royal Adelaide Hospital has been designed by Silver Thomas Hanley, in partnership with DesignInc. Its scale meant that over 200 people were working on the design proposals simultaneously from a variety of organisations across the supply chain. Such a collaboration served to introduce a number of Australian firms to BIM for the very first time.

During the early construction phase, the 176,000sqm building was sub-divided into 19 different sectors, each acting as a stand-alone project in its own right. This enabled design consultants and contractors to progress and resolve design development issues at a local level. Using BIM, they could then federate their information models to form a holistic overview where larger issues or trends could be identified and addressed. BIM enabled the design proposals to be tested virtually beforehand to minimize the number of clashes on site and improve the installation programme.

The process of design development and approval was elucidated by end users being able to see and experience their new environment in three-dimensional form, rather than having to envisage it from plans or obscure equipment codes. In all, some 450 user group meetings were held with hospital staff.

The project team used 4D construction sequencing to plan the works and monitor their progress once underway. They also tested some initial 5D BIM work, checking quantities from the information models against the more traditional take-off and costing exercises to evaluate the future opportunities.

Contractors on site were able to access all the appropriate 2D installation drawings via real-time links with the 3D models on tablets. This allowed data to be input, reviewed and analysed in the field, and the project team believe this reduced the waste caused by rework by 12%.

Developing a cutting-edge Single Point of Truth newRAH Information Centre System or “SPOTNIC”. The SPOTNIC system streamlined the management, development and operation of design and construction data. It allowed teams to consistently capture, manage, maintain and report all completion data in a highly efficient way.

As a Public Private Partnership (PPP), the consortium has an invested interest in both the construction and ongoing facilities management of the facility. The federated model will be accessed via a centralised database populated with all the technical handover data to provide the single source of truth adding significant value to the whole project life cycle.

In total, 80GB of model data will be handed over to Spotless the Facilities Manager from the generation of 450 Revit models, which has 11,107 Room Spaces, has over 4,000,000 3D objects, provides 128 Federated Sector Models which hosts 3,500 Navisworks models.

View the full case study developed by our partners at TheBIM - https://youtu.be/qY7eRQspc1E