Construction Business Review

Rosendin
Leveraging BIM in Electrical Construction

Rosendin Electric, RosendinFred Meeske, Vice President
Building construction and architectural industries saw various developments and innovations in the past decade, enabling planning, designing, constructing, and managing more complex and larger-scale projects. The industry continues to leverage technological advancements in drone and robotics technologies, Artificial Intelligence, and 3D Printing to facilitate faster high-quality work. According to the engineering and construction outlook of Deloitte-2021, 76 percent of engineering and construction professionals stated that they are planning to invest in new digital technologies this year as this would help business owners enable digital transformations and stay competitive.

One of the key construction technologies is the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM). BIM provides a digital-graphical representation of a building’s physical and functional properties and characteristics, which helps plan, build, and hand over the project. Proper models go beyond showing only the physical representation of a building to include information about every component that goes into it, such as cost, schedule, manufacturer, etc. As a result, BIM helps engineers and modelers to design more effectively and construction professionals to build more efficiently with less rework. Using BIM as a progressive model becomes the single source of truth throughout the construction process, which immediately improves communication and collaboration between various stakeholders. The U.K. and German governments have made BIM compulsory on every state-funded project in 2016 and 2020, respectively.

Rosendin was founded in 1919 and became an employee-owned company in 1993.

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Over the past century, Rosendin’s market has changed and grown from wiring motors and homes to building large industrial, high tech, and commercial projects, with both a national and international presence. It is one of the largest electrical specialty contractors in the U.S., with over $2 billion in revenue per year. One of Rosendin’s core values is “We Innovate.” This core value was one of the main reasons for starting and growing the BIM department in 2008. Thirteen years after its inception, Rosendin’s BIM group is now the largest internal BIM group to any contractor in the U.S., with more than 220 modelers, coordinators, and detailers. The group, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, has a presence in every Rosendin office throughout the U.S.

The BIM group supports the different business leads and their varying requirements, which are very different for a solar job compared to a high-tech facility. By being internal to Rosendin, the BIM group can continuously provide value throughout the construction project’s lifecycle and is agile to respond to changing customer requirements. The BIM group ensures that Rosendin’s operational groups and divisions realize and understand the value of developing and maintaining the model, regardless of the specific construction sector we are serving.

Moreover, the BIM group rolls out innovations that extend the model’s function to non-traditional use cases. For example, the BIM group internally developed an Augmented Reality (AR) solution that allows the field to view the model at full scale on the job site from their iPads, referred to as a Sheet Viewer. In a semiconductor fab, this has allowed the group to review that the planned pieces would fit before prefabricating, saving rework down the line. The Sheet Viewer can also quantify quantities installed in the field and automatically store and connect the data back visually into the model.

To date, the BIM group has assisted in more than 700 projects of various sizes, the largest being well more than $100 million in construction value. In the future, Rosendin’s BIM group plans to rollout a connected informational system to allow professionals to manage and operate facilities, management, and groups to know when things are being installed, need to be replaced, how much they cost, and where they are procured.