BIM 360 Glue/Field

It was towards the end of March when I attended a seminar about Autodesk's recent flagship products, BIM 360 Glue and BIM 360 Field. This event was arranged by the Scandinavian provider of modelling and drawing software, Cad-Q, at their headquarters in Stockholm. In principle, these two product are an effort for promoting a cloud-based building information storage and management. BIM 360 Glue is in principle developed as a design tool, while BIM 360 Field will be used in the construction site.

BIM 360 Glue is aimed to be integrated to the Revit/Navisworks workflow and manage multidisciplinary model coordination, clash/conflict control and communication via web applications, tablets and smart phones. Coordination issues can be marked and reported via email. By running the software on tablets, it would be possible to benefit from the immersive capacity of the package, physically navigating around the space and measuring distances for controlling clearances. The clash detection function is however not active on tablets. BIM Glue seems to have maintained a strong focus on issue management based on specific templates for different types of issues (issues related to quality, security, constructability etc.) and a centralized web-based issue repository. Issues are attached to and handled at the object's level. BIM Glue strives to integrate the information repository, the model-checking tool and the communication environment into the design software all provided in-house at the convenience of Autodesk customers. It is possible to import and merge models in a variety of formats (dwg, dxf, ifc etc).

BIM 360 Field is actually a data management system for construction sights with in-built functionalities for commissioning and hand over. BIM Field allows importing varous types of building information from a variety of databases and applications such as MSProject. Inspection checklists and legal documents can be imported and integrated to BIM Field. Both BIM Glue and BIM Field can be synchronized with Navisworks Manage.

What seems to be still missing is an automated link for infomation transfer between Glue and Field. Apparently, information should be imported from Glue to Field (say from the design database to the construction database) almost manually. This glitch is in fact not specific to Autodesk's flagship products rather should be attributed to the fragmentation and shortsightedness still prevailing in the construction industry which is naturally also reflected in their tools, workflows and information management routines.