A delegation of representatives from three of the most important institutions in Malaysia related to the construction industry has visited the headquarters of the Spanish technology company CYPE with the aim of collaborating, innovating and being able to develop new applications with BIM technology in the future to improve the preparation of bills of quantities in construction work in Malaysia.
More specifically, members of the Royal Institution of Surveyors Malaysia (RISM), the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) and the Pacific Association of Quantity Surveyors (PAQS) have spent the past week exchanging information with CYPE managers on the use of BIM programs for cost estimation in construction projects, laying the foundations for a future collaboration that seeks to optimise the use of BIM applications in the preparation of bills of quantities for jobs carried out in Malaysia in an Open BIM workflow.
In this field, the Spanish technology company already has different programs that allow it to carry out construction bills of quantities using BIM technology. More specifically, the Open BIM Quantities application extracts the quantities and creates bills of quantities based on BIM models that have been defined using the IFC standard. This program can also correlate the entities present in the BIM model with items via customisable rules of measurement to make the bill of quantities more in line with reality.
CYPE's technical director, Carlos Fernández, explained that during the visit, different topics were addressed, such as the workflows that currently exist for generating bills of quantities, ranging from manual methods, passing through the generation of quantities from 2D projects, to the quantities of BIM models created in programs such as CYPE Architecture, Revit, Archicad and Allplan, among others.
"The correlation between the entities of a BIM model and the items of a cost database, the use of the BC3 standard for the description of building elements and their associated costs, the inclusion of environmental data and the global parameters that affect a project's bill of quantities have also been studied in these meetings," he explains.
At this point, CYPE's experience in the development of the construction cost database "Generador de precios", a multi-parametric database present in 27 countries, was one of the points that most impressed the representatives of the Malaysian delegation, who saw it as an excellent tool to help improve the efficiency of Malaysian companies by facilitating more accurate construction bills of quantities.
"The ability of the construction cost database to obtain cost estimates that are as accurate as possible, making it easier to prepare high-quality and useful project documents for the different phases of the building's life cycle, both with manufacturers' products and generic products, has pleasantly surprised them," emphasises CYPE's technical director.
The representatives of the Malaysian institutions and CYPE agreed during the visit to the headquarters of the Spanish technology company to continue collaborating to improve the generation of construction bills of quantities in Malaysia with BIM software. To achieve this, the two parties will exchange information, carry out comparative market studies and organise joint workshops and training seminars.
Malaysian delegation
The Malaysian delegation included representatives from the Royal Institution of Surveyors Malaysia (RISM), the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) and the Pacific Association of Quantity Surveyors (PAQS). RISM is dedicated to professional development and excellence in the field of estimating and valuation of construction work. The CIDB, on the other hand, is a governmental body that seeks to promote the development and improvement of the construction industry in the country by setting quality standards and sustainable regulations. The Pacific Association of Quantity Surveyors is a regional association that promotes knowledge sharing and collaboration between professionals and organisations specialising in construction quantity surveying.
