This years TCIC Student Bid Competition achieved top-notch results from over 72 student teams from 7 schools nation wide. This simulated bidding competition runs every year and has continued to grow and produce excellent results from future construction professionals. This year’s competition included an award for the use of BIM within competing teams bid packages. The results for the BIM award were extremely impressive, with teams extracting highly accurate quantities from programs like Revit, to teams producing photorealistic renderings to aid their bid packages.
(L to R: GBC Students, Evan Hutley, Jonathan Shibley, Jonathan Kerr and Daryl Ballesteros)
The winning team from this year’s competition for the Inaugural BIM Award demonstrating ‘Innovation Through BIM’ was Millennium Construction Group, from George Brown College for the Thompson Rivers University, Brown Family House of Learning in Kamloops, British Columbia.
CanBIM caught up with Jonathan Kerr, one of the team members from the Award Winning BIM team.
CanBIM: What does the TCIC Bid Competition mean to your team and tell how BIM was used in your project submission?
Jonathan: The TCIC Bid Competition was an enlightening experience, we tried to incorporate as many BIM enabled technologies as possible to qualify for the Innovation Award category. When we synched the construction schedule to the model using Synchro Software, it allowed us to get a progression month by month to see how the building was going to be constructed. When we did quantity takeoffs from the building we found that using Revit for the quantity takeoffs, was more accurate than using Plan Swift, which the majority of our competitors were using.
CanBIM: How do you feel a competition like this prepares you for the real world?
Jonathan: It allows for a demonstration of what the real activities would be in the industry. It allows for understanding of how a real bid process commences and the extenuating effort that is required to produce a qualifying bid that is both compliant and complete. It was a difficult challenge; it was a lot of hours, a lot of hard work, trying to think of things that other students wouldn’t try to do as well. You are trying to go for originality as well and make your project stand out. The more information and the more documents you can extract from the building to provide in reference were definitely in our favour. It was a rewarding experience to say the least.
CanBIM: How do you view BIM having gone through this experience?
Jonathan: BIM is extremely necessary, especially on larger projects. It allows multiple partners and stakeholders to have input into designs regardless of their geographic location. The amount of preconstruction information you can extract from a proficient BIM is extraordinary. And to think BIM is still progressing and is fairly new compared to traditional methodologies.
CanBIM: Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and congratulations to you and your team.
Jonathan:I would like to thank my teammates for their efforts to make this project successful, and on behalf of my team mates, I would like to thank George Brown College for the opportunity to participate, and Dean Xuereb, Field Operations Manager from PCL Construction who was our Mentor during the competition and won the Esteemed Mentor Award for his guidance to our team during this competition.
Congratulations to all the participating teams, and thanks to TCIC for welcoming CanBIM in as a Sponsor. We look forward to seeing what next years competition brings!
