The Application of Industry Standards as an Alternative to in-House Proprietary Standards Within the AEC iIndustry

The move from traditional 2D Computer Aided Design (CAD) practices towards Building Information Modelling (BIM) has witnessed some practices trying to adopt and update their own in-house CAD standards. These standards are wholly inadequate for working in a collaborative BIM environment and mean that they repetitively create and recreate local, non-reusable, non-interoperable solutions to the same problems, which leads to the employees potentially having to learn a new collaborative process every time they have to work with a new project team. Collaborative standards help teams produce information through a standardised process, so as to ensure the same form and quality to enable information to be used and reused without change or interpretation. These standards permit common ways of creating, storing, and accessing, exchanging and communicating built asset information. This allows the supply chain to organise itself around defined roles and further permits diverse project teams to have a mutual understanding and trust with each other. This can therefore result in improvement across the board that include better teamwork, better scheduling, better risk management and better costs control. This paper will present the case for companies to move from existing in-house CAD Standards towards more rewarding collaborative Industry standards. The data collation methodology included an in-depth questionnaire that investigated the practice of using inhouse standards. The results have indicated that a more robust direction is to adopt an industry standard in order to ensure a more rewarding BIM process