Ready for the dawn of the BIM age in Germany? What component manufacturers should keep in mind

The coalition agreement of the new German federal government consisting of the SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and the FDP announces a new departure in construction, housing and urban development policy. Many in the construction industry have long considered this necessary. An important first step was the establishment of a dedicated construction ministry in December 2021, which last existed in 1998. Long demanded by representatives of the industry, measures are to be developed in the new ministry to master the major challenges in the areas of digitalization, climate change, energy transition, housing construction and infrastructure.

CADENAS has been pushing the topic of Building Information Modeling (BIM) for years and supports manufacturers in providing their building products as intelligent 3D CAD BIM models. With a digital product catalog based on the BIMcatalogs.net solution, component manufacturers from the construction industry are therefore well equipped for the announced digitalization offensive.

An important point in the coalition agreement is the reduction of bureaucracy through digitalization in order to accelerate planning processes. For example, the government wants to implement Open-BIM and uniform interfaces and standards. With Open-BIM, planning data is exchanged using open file formats. This allows different planning software to be used without losing information, which is a great advantage for construction projects with many trades involved. It is currently still unclear by when Open-BIM will be implemented throughout Germany. It is obvious, however, that something needs to be done. With BIMcatalogs.net, component manufacturers can already provide their products as Multi CAD capable planning data, which can be provided or generated in millions of combinations regarding CAD system, classification, specifications, Level of Information (LOI), Level of Geometry (LOG) etc. from one database. This ensures that all project participants receive the required product information in the appropriate format.

The German government has also set the goal to use the potential of digitalization for greater sustainability. A building resource passport is to be introduced in order to take a closer look at the consumption of gray energy and lifecycle costs and thus to optimize them. This will require a digital twin that bundles all the information on a building. With digital twins, engineers and architects can visualize a building, perform analyses, optimize the performance of technical systems, etc. To do this, however, the individual components of the object must also be available as digital twins. With BIMcatalogs.net, manufacturers can digitize their products as 3D CAD BIM models and have them enriched with all important meta-information, such as maintenance intervals. The generated product data is neutralized so that they can also be used for public tenders.