February 5, 2008

BIM brings sharp focus to laser-maker Cymer Inc.’s construction project

SAN DIEGO, CALIF.

When San Diego’s Cymer Inc. needed to quickly expand its Rancho Bernardo manufacturing facility to get a new laser product to market, the company embraced a new method of construction planning aimed at resolving conflicts among architects and engineers before laying a single brick.

BIM, or Building Information Modelling, incorporates onto one software platform the various schematics and plans made by architects, engineers and consultants to create a three-dimensional model of the project that can be shared among them and tweaked in real time.

When using BIM, a project developer can see and correct unforeseen conflicts that often plague projects once construction begins.

“The (Cymer) design was always in flux due to the owners’ constraints, so for us to be able to be dynamic and flexible was very important to the project,” said John Modjeski, senior vice president of University Mechanical & Engineering Contractors of El Cajon, Calif., which led the project.

Cymer makes lasers used in manufacturing semiconductor chips.

The expansion project required implementing extensive engineering designs — stainless steel piping, utilities and large air ducts — without disrupting operations.

University Mechanical used a software program to combine the 3-D architectural renderings with the engineering plans to create a 3-D grayscale model of the building. Weekly, about 15 team members would gather for “clash detection” meetings at the firm’s headquarters.

Project planners could see existing conflicts in integrated plans — for example that a pipe was incorrectly drawn through a structural beam. The team was able to move the pipe two inches in the design stage.

“The benefit is that it not only avoids conflicts so the relationship with the client is stronger, but it does away with the inherent adversarial relationship with contractors,” said Chris Veum, president of Austin Veum Robbins Partners, the architecture firm on the Cymer expansion project.

“It allows all the mechanical systems to prefabricate their duct work to 95 percent accuracy, as opposed to building the duct work in the field,” he said an interview with the San Diego Business Journal.

The modelling method enabled more collaboration that was helpful during the Cymer expansion.

“The big use of the tool as we saw it was during co-ordination meetings,” said Dan Cancelleri, senior director of facilities and operation services for Cymer. “In real time we could see what’s going on and talk solutions through.

“It surely saves you from making a lot of field changes, and that saves you lots of money in the construction business,” he added.

“We did a project here that was incredibly time constrained.”

DCN News Services

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