Take BIM Processes to the next level with Digital Twins

Organisations in all industries are under pressure to deliver more robust and innovative operating models. Bart Brink, Global Director for Digital Twin at Royal HaskoningDHV, and Casey Rutland, UK Director of Digital at Royal HaskoningDHV, explore how digital twins can elevate BIM processes to create sustainable value and competitive advantage.

The world is in transition. Challenges and opportunities arise with increasing frequency, customers are more demanding, and societal expectations are higher. These changes, combined with the rapid rate of digital innovation, are forcing significant business transformation across almost every sector – and widescale strategic changes for many organisations.

Embracing Building Information Modelling (BIM) has been a valuable step in this transformation journey. By using BIM methodologies and standards to collaboratively create digital representations of assets, organisations have brought new consistency and efficiency to their design, construction and operation acca.

But BIM isn’t a technology or asset that you can simply deploy to modernise operations and then forget about. It’s a process, and the key to long-term success and value within any process is intelligent evolution.

BIM has proven itself as a valuable mechanism for connecting information and ideas between different stakeholders. Yet, despite its aim to link the design and asset management phases of a project, it’s often used solely as a 3D-modelling tool for design and construction stages – and misses the chance to demonstrate its value throughout the asset lifecycle.

Now, it’s time for forward-thinking leaders to evolve their BIM outputs beyond design and construction and find new ways of deepening the use of collaborative data models in operational strategies through digital twin adoption.

DIGITAL TWINS: DRIVING OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE IN A DIGITAL AGE

BIM processes and digital twin strategies are built on a number of common principles; both are concerned with improving process visibility, aligning stakeholders and supporting planning. But more importantly, they’re both extremely useful for helping teams look at assets not as siloed, capex-focused investments, but instead as ongoing projects.

Successful BIM processes and frameworks help you establish a clear project vision, that supports business outcomes before design commences or work begins on site. But, in order to continuously improve and adapt projects to deliver greater value to everyone once work has begun, you need the real-time insights. That’s where digital twins become extremely useful.

Digital twins allow you to visualise, monitor and optimise your operational assets, processes and resources by harnessing live data. This provides vital, real-time insights into performance and activity. At its core, a digital twin can be an output of a BIM process and is essentially a ‘living’ version of the project or asset view that BIM processes exist to create – able to evolve and transform using real-time data once the asset is in use.

To gain maximum value from every asset at every stage of its definition, design, construction and operation, subsequent capital expenditure projects should contribute to the creation of an ongoing digital twin, again through the BIM process. That twin will act both as a single source of truth for the asset throughout its lifecycle, and as a blueprint for future innovation and improvement – taking a process and elevating it into an evolving project.