Building Information Models

Site-Tractor is built on the principles of Total Construction Management (TCM) and Building Information Modeling (BIM). Total Construction Management is Project Management taken to the next level: Providing all the stakeholders across multiple construction projects with the information and communication tools necessary to efficiently price, manage and complete every aspect of each of their projects, all in a clear, seamless and natural way – from one app and with the interface they are most at home with. So that understanding where one is in a project and what is required, is practically automatic

But to actually do this, in order to make information relevant, useful and up-to-date, the information that precedes the construction needs to be as seamless and as complete. Enter BIM. Site-Tractor is the first project management package to fully integrate an industry standard into the small contractor’s sphere.

Up until now, the design-build paradigm has been out of reach of most small contractors. The initial cost and investment required for a design arm of a company has been too great to allow the leap. This is a tremendous loss and burden for the construction industry as a whole. Projects take longer, suffer more cost overruns from inefficiencies and reduced options, and decision-making as a whole suffers. Design-build affords a greater potential for better construction informed by parameters heretofore mostly out of reach of the majority of builders.

What if we can bring BIM with its effective pricing, energy modelling and sophisticated planning tools into the reach of every contracting firm, regardless of size? Site-tractor does that by incorporating BIM into the management work-flow.

Instead of abstracting a designer’s ideas into an abstract language specific to designers, BIM does not merely reproduce plans and sections. Instead BIM models the real in 3D and then produces the plans, sections and views from that real model. This means, one doesn’t just have plans and sections, one actually already has EVERY POSSIBLE PLAN, SECTION and DETAIL for that building. Moreover one already has a complete takeoff of the weight, cost, dimensions, number and technical specifications ready at hand for the building and every component in it. BIM begins with a 3D model of every component—with each and every component’s material and spatial characteristics included and mapped out—and puts them all together FROM THE START to build the idea, the abstractions and the building, ALL TOGETHER.

If the cost of each component and its installation is up to date in the database, then the costs Costs are there and can be calculated on the fly, from the start. Both the fortuitous congruities of possible programs overlapping as much as the conflicts of structure and gas conduits are equally revealed, flagged and ready to be exploited or removed as required. This is only possible when the abstraction and the real evolve together and with all stake holders present at the table. This is the power of BIM.