“Building Information Modelling offers many competitive advantages”

RICHARD RUNDELL, manager, architectural product marketing, Autodesk, answers a few questions posed by EXPRESS COMPUTER

What is your focus in the Indian market?

The Indian building and construction industry is expanding phenomenally. There has been a significant increase in the construction of commercial facilities, residential complexes and infrastructure such as roads and bridges. With the involvement of multiple participating groups in a number of locations who need the most up-to-date information, Building Information Modelling enables building industry professionals in India to use a more organised and automated method in their business.

What is the total potential in the building industry for Autodesk? What has been the growth in this segment in the last 1-2 years? Any estimates for the coming years?

The potential in the Indian building industry is immense. With India becoming a key global business destination, its infrastructure has grown at a frenetic pace. There has been tremendous growth in the construction of commercial facilities, residential complexes and infrastructure such as roads and bridges.

The fact that our customer portfolio consists of organisations such as Airport Authority of India, BSNL, Central Public Works Department, CSIR, Delhi Development Authority, Delhi Metro Railway, National Security Guard, and NTPC is testimony to the fact that there is a rapid adoption of technology in the building industry.

The building industry in India being largely fragmented, what are the challenges that you face?

One of the challenges that we face in an industry that is fragmented is to initiate the adoption of technology uniformly across all user groups which may vary from large architecture organisations to small supplier firms. The willingness to adopt technology uniformly and to completely automate the process is essential to ensure that building industry professionals can fully leverage the benefits of their technology.

What are the current levels of IT penetration in the building industry?

The levels of IT penetration are not very high in smaller organisations. They are however recognising the need to adopt technology and are moving rapidly in this direction.

What is Autodesk’s BIM strategy?

BIM is an innovative new approach to building design, construction and management introduced by Autodesk in 2002. It is essentially the intersection of two critical ideas. One, keeping critical design information in digital form makes it easier to update and share, and more valuable to the firms creating and using it. Two, creating real-time, consistent relationships between digital design data and innovative parametric building modelling technology can save significant amounts of time and money, and increase project productivity and quality.

The advantages that BIM confers are increased speed of delivery (time saved), better coordination (fewer errors), decreased costs (money saved), greater productivity, higher-quality work, and new revenue and business opportunities.