Due to the high-detail infrastructure demands of the project – with over 16,000 rooms, and over 125,000 individual pieces of medical fitout across multiple theatres, operating theatres and specialised rooms – documenting the designs and schedules in a conventional CAD environment would have been almost impossible.

To help meet the ambitious goals set for the project, the Ministry of Interior for Saudi Arabia mandated the implementation of Building Information Modelling (BIM) for the design and construction of the hospital complexes. The project team at P&T Group decided to use a combination of Autodesk® Revit® for the project’s design and documentation and Autodesk® BIM 360™ Docs for project collaboration.

Whilst P&T Group had used Autodesk Revit solutions elsewhere in Asia and the Middle East, this was the first time that the architecture practice would be using the technology in Saudi Arabia.

Revit is a robust architectural design and documentation software application specifically designed to support building information modelling (BIM) workflows. Revit can leverage dynamic information in intelligent models — allowing complex building structures to be accurately designed and documented in a short amount of time. Each intelligent model created with Revit represents an entire project and is stored in a single database file. This allows changes made in one part of the model to be automatically propagated to other parts of the model, thus enhancing workflow.

P&T Group’s team was made up of colleagues in Saudi Arabia, the United States, Portugal, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Spain and Vietnam. This created a huge amount of data, which not only needed to be shared securely, but also made constantly available. Uploading and downloading the hundreds of 3D models that were being produced in different countries would have meant designers had to deal with lots of ‘dead time’ and wasn’t practical with the team located in multiple time zones.  

Utilising BIM processes to coordinate between the geolocations enabled the design team to manage the workflow with maximum efficiency to cope with the wholesale design changes brought about by medical planning revisions and incorporation of the latest legislative standards in a timely manner.  This reduced the timeframe by as much as 40% and more importantly, meant that designers were comfortable in the knowledge that changes circulated through the hospital in a well-coordinated, robust manner, thus reducing errors.

Andrew Woods, BIM Manager at P&T Group said: “Companies tend to pick small projects to get used to any new technology, but in starting with BIM on one of the world’s largest hospitals, we did the exact opposite. Our core team was excellent and believed from the outset that producing all our output for the design of the hospitals in BIM models would help us to deliver our best work. We’ve always been innovators and wanted to push ourselves on this project to fully embrace the BIM environment.”

P&T Group wanted to set the project up based on BIM Level 2. Though this is not a compulsory requirement in Saudi Arabia, P&T made this decision based on the knowledge that the proposed ISO Standards would be largely based on the British Standard PAS 1192 documents and therefore align P&T with industry best practice in the region and provide a robust platform on which to develop their BIM Standards.

Alongside the combination of Autodesk® Revit® Architecture, Autodesk® Revit® Structure, and Autodesk® Revit® MEP software, P&T Group also implemented Autodesk® Navisworks® Manage software for coordination and collaboration, and AutoCAD® software to supplement the drawing production. During the design stage, P&T moved the huge quantities of data produced in Revit to BIM 360, a unified common data platform that promotes integrated, collaborative workflows between architecture, engineering and construction teams.

The extended architectural and structural teams – with designers in offices around the world – were able to collaborate and contribute insights about their design models in the context of the project. Being able to rely on a single source of information without having to check who had the latest version of the model meant teams were ultimately much more productive.  

In 2016 as Lead Consultant, P&T Group set up the Common Data Environment (CDE) hosted on the BIM 360 Docs Platform in accordance with PAS 1192 standards. The flexibility and ease of use of the BIM 360 Docs platform means that the CDE can be set up in a manner that best suits the project demands in a secure and robust platform. As it is a SaaS (Software as a Service) platform it evolves and improves significantly over time, introducing new features and enhancing the application. Due to the sheer scale of these projects, to cope with the massive amount of data, over 8500 folders where set up and typically over 5700 individual documents are uploaded by the team every month.

P&T is already reaping huge benefits by implementing BIM and will continue to see further benefits by utilising the experience and skills gained, on further projects. Despite being slightly different structurally, the design of the second hospital is almost identical to the hospital in Riyadh, meaning much of the initial design work has already been completed. The initial challenges that P&T faced when setting up the CDE, putting together a team with the right skills and working towards delivering a project to BIM Level 2, have all been addressed and much of the documentation saved on BIM 360 Docs can be re-used for the construction of the second site.