Wendy Lim
AEC Community Manager Wendy Lim recently met with Phil Simon, Skanska BIM Manager and Community Expert Elite, to talk about his career in AEC, the possibilities of BIM, and the value of sharing knowledge in the Autodesk Community.
What attracted you to a career in BIM?
Construction was already my career. I had worked in the trades, as a foreman, project manager, estimator, and scheduler. Along the way I had used AutoCAD as a coordination tool. I had also briefly run a civil engineering company, and used AutoCAD Land Development desktop. I was amazed at the creativity involved in civil design, liked using the tools, and saw opportunity to increase productivity and reduce waste on projects. I used these tools as a project manager and scheduler, and eventually decided to pursue a BIM career after learning to use Revit in 2009.
What advancement in BIM are you most excited about and why?
Cloud sharing and cloud computing. The ultimate goal of BIM is about sharing data, and cloud applications finally make this possible. This is key to everything we can use our BIM tools and processes to do.
What’s an interesting trend you’ve observed in AEC industry and what does AEC industry look like a year from now? five years? ten?
I’ve seen an incredible increase in the collaboration between design teams, owners, and construction managers. Years ago, it was difficult even to get models to coordinate with. Now, design teams see value in obtaining wider input much earlier in the project, and projects seem to be much better designed and coordinated. Early collaboration allows design teams to manage their time to address critical design issues without having to worry so much about developing constructible details. It puts design teams in much more of a review/evaluation position for detailing, which provides an additional layer of error-checking.
So much knowledge in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry is experience-based. What do you think are the best ways to share knowledge?
That’s a good question, and I think it’s a much greater challenge for smaller firms than it is for larger ones. Larger firms tend to have internal communities which develop their own knowledge bases with lessons learned, and common databases of things like shared parameters, which both standardize project development and trigger thinking based on lessons learned from past projects.
I think the Autodesk Community Forums are an important method of knowledge sharing. In future, I think it would be useful to develop a searchable knowledge base separate from boards and forums too.
Now that you using Architecture, Engineering & Construction Industry Solutions, what’s the #1 thing you’re able to do that you weren’t before?
My job wouldn’t really exist without those products. Basically, everything I do for project teams is based on the capabilities of those projects. The benefits, from spatial coordination to constructability review to schedule planning and visualization, logistics, and quantification all of that was incredibly labor-intensive prior to the availability of those tools, and often just couldn’t be accomplished in ways that were timely for project use.
You have recently been accepted as Autodesk Expert Elite. What does being an Autodesk Expert Elite mean to you?
It’s a source of tremendous pride, and it’s humbling. I definitely feel a much more formal obligation to assist other people in the BIM world, and to continue to learn more and more how to use Autodesk products. I don’t want to disappoint anybody. 😊
Visit AEC Community Member Philip’s Autodesk Community profile
If you’d like to share your story, get in touch at aec.community@autodesk.com