WINNER

GHAFARI Associates, LLC and General Motors Corporation

Enabling Integrated Project Delivery Using ProjectWise and BIM
Dearborn, Michigan

GHAFARI served as the architect/engineer and 3D integrator on a series of six design-build projects for General Motors where 3D-enabled delivery and BIM were a requirement. The projects are highly collaborative among the participants, which include GHAFARI’s engineering teams, General Motors engineers, and the combined efforts of the general contractors and primary subcontractors, fabricators, and their detailing teams.

Lansing Delta Township Assembly Complex, a 1.4-million square-foot facility in Dearborn, Mich., was the first in the series. Using ProjectWise and other Bentley products, the team designed multiple facilities using best-in-class BIM platforms and accessed the models on a daily basis within a compressed design/construction schedule. The team also managed and distributed hundreds of 3D models, thousands of drawing files, and submittals in real time across multiple geographic locations.

FINALIST

CH2M HILL

B&W Pantex New Processing Facility -- BIM Development
Amarillo, Texas

Babcock & Wilcox Technical Services Pantex, LLC is an independent company formed solely to manage the Pantex plant for the Department of Energy (DOE). The primary goal of this project was to develop an integrated BIM initiative. The BIM approach was so successful that the DOE aggressively pursued -- through review comments and actual funding -- the extension of the effort into the four-year construction period.

Using an array of Bentley’s BIM solutions, CH2M HILL built a highly detailed model of the existing design, brought the team together to review, search for problems, and resolve them, and then generated a new set of bid documents from the model. This model was then the source for a new set of bid documents that would replace the existing set developed in 2D.

FINALIST

GHAFARI Associates, LLC and General Motors Corporation

3D Enabled -- Plant Expansion at the General Motors Toledo Powertrain Transmission Plant
Toledo, Ohio

General Motors is expanding its Toledo, Ohio, transmission plant to produce a new Hydra-Matic 6L80 six-speed, rear-wheel-drive automatic transmission for full-size SUVs and trucks that includes 275,000 square feet of facility renovation and 475,000 square feet of new construction. GHAFARI’s design-build team was able to push 3D-enabled delivery to levels beyond what was achieved on previous projects.

Lean methodologies were implemented through Bentley’s BIM solutions and ProjectWise by the design-build team consisting of hundreds of team members, including GHAFARI architects and engineers, General Motors facility engineering, General Motors process engineering, detailers, fabricators, contractors, and subcontractors. Bentley’s commitment to interoperable formats and scalable document management solutions provided highly collaborative 3D-enabled projects using a more efficient workflow facilitated by a single shared data set.

Return to the 2008 Be Awards