An interview with Guido Venturini:
Guido Venturini is from Italy with 24 years of experience in the international construction industry, focused mainly on underground and hydroelectric projects. He has been in Canada since September of 2012 working as a technical manager and deputy area manager for a large international contractor. He has also spent several months in Labrador, where he was involved in the Muskrat Falls Project as a Contractor Representative.
CanBIM recently had the opportunity to speak to Guido about his experiences with BIM and its implementation in the international space.
Labrador - Muskrat Falls Project
CanBIM: Tell us about your role at SWS.
Guido Venturini: I’m the CEO and Business Development Manager of SWS Canada Consultants Ltd., which is fully owned by SWS, a Junior Engineering Company operating in Italy, France, Norway, Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, UK, Canada, US, Laos and Philippines. I’m currently overseeing operations in Canada, USA and the Pacific rim.
CanBIM: How has SWS adapted to incorporate BIM within their workflow?
Guido Venturini: BIM has progressively changed the traditional organizational chart for SWS. A new layer of young engineers (BIM Engineers) has been hired. BIM Engineers represent an intermediate interface between designers and draftsmen. New skills are also required at the Project Management level, where the traditional PM is often supported by SWS BIM Managers able to coordinate and guide BIM Engineers and bridge traditional engineering know-how with new BIM technologies and potential.
Labrador - Muskrat Falls Project
CanBIM: What struggles have SWS faced when implementing BIM internationally?
Guido Venturini: There was a difficult shift in PM/Designers and draftsmen mentality as well as the efforts of learning new tools and new procedures. Then, there was the challenge of quoting unknown activities. At the earliest stage the first struggle was how to choose a platform while having little experience of BIM tools and its potential. The continuous struggle is to set up and maintain standards and templates for final deliverable emission.
Paris Metro Project
CanBIM: What types of projects does SWS incorporate BIM into?
Guido Venturini: SWS incorporates BIM from tunneling to infrastructure or underground metro stations to HPP. There is no acceptance threshold for its application but there is progressive innovation in its use within SWS projects.
CanBIM: How is SWS utilizing BIM for Project Management and Risk Management tasks?
Guido Venturini: SWS leverages BIM technologies to efficiently convert design input data in a digital format. Information implemented in BIM models is extracted and persisted in a database designed and implemented by SWS. Design and risk assessment procedures have been implemented in object oriented scripts able to gather data from the database and further process them and enrich database content. Project management is boosted by this approach in terms of structured and centralized project data management. The impact of change requests is minimized ensuring the least number of manual editing and an automatic propagation of the new design basis (or data).
Italy - Catania Metro Station
CanBIM: What is SWS focusing on within the Canadian market?
Guido Venturini: SWS seeks to support Canadian owners during the design, construction, operation and maintenance of a project through the systematic application of BIM technologies as a unique overvalue in terms of asset management. We are also interested to share with the contractors, the benefits of the BIM approach during the construction phase, mainly in relation to all project control processes. Finally, we are also targeting to support the mining industry in the application of BIM methodology for their planning, development and operation phases, especially in consideration of the high potential of this approach with regard to material flow management.
Thank you Guido for your contribution to the Canadian BIM community. We appreciate our members at CanBIM for sharing valuable information with us. If you or your firm has a project to share, please do not hesitate to reach out and be featured in our monthly newsletter!
