KIRK Group ahead of the game again

As the UK Engineering & Construction Industry moves closer towards BIM Level 2 Compliance being a compulsory requirement in certain sectors by April 2016, KIRK GROUP have once again been ahead of the game by being the first contractor in their industry to offer information in this format to their clients as standard.

KIRK have invested significantly in state-of-the-art parametric modelling software, forging a partnership with Cad2assist one of Autodesk’s GOLD partners in the process and now the entire Engineering Team have use of the latest version of Autodesk® Product Design Suite; Autodesk® Inventor Professional in particular. The implementation of this move to a BIM compatible system began nine months ago with significant investment in new hardware and software licences and has continued with a full training programme of all engineering staff who have then moved on to produce the complex library of parts and models that are the heart of the operation.

KIRK Engineering Director, Johnathan Brook says: “Building Information Modelling is not just simply the ability to produce a fancy 3D model, it goes much further than that and will produce efficiencies right across the industry. It’s all about standardisation, collaboration and sharing data in interoperable file formats that can be used from the start to the very end of the life of a ‘project’ with the ’project’ being anything we design, construct, and operate.”

There is no doubt that ‘BIM’ is the buzzword of the moment, however, the process of moving over a whole engineering resource from one platform to another is not easy and shouldn’t be underestimated but for KIRK it has been part of much larger plan with timescales that have been planned to fit with the workflow of the business.

On the timing of the project KIRK GROUP Managing Director, Andrew Peace commented: “After we achieved our CE Marking Accreditation for Access Steelwork in late 2014, we saw an opportunity to move our engineering resource over to this new platform as the next logical step. A large majority of our work comes from the UK Water Industry and the transition between five year AMP spending cycles has historically resulted in a drop in workload for the business from around January to July. As a business we took the decision not to reduce our engineering resources during this period, we would commit to the investment and simply use the spare capacity that was available to fast-track the transition, go through the training, build the library and ensure we were ready for the workload in AMP6 with a market leading solution that will benefit the business and our customers.”

KIRK have been heavily involved with several major clients in the Water Industry to fully understand their needs and ensure that they offer information created with the correct Level of Detail (LOD) and Level of Information (LOI) using structured, non-graphical data using COBie (Construction to Operations Building information exchange) and Databases.

Andrew Peace added: “We are incredibly proud to be the first company in our sector to be able to offer this level of engineering detail and support to our clients. It is further evidence of our commitment to lead the way in engineering excellence in our industry and deliver the best value to our customers.”