Primafrance

Primafrance is supporting its clients in organizing and implementing systems of steering and projects management.
The company consists of 5 divisions : Aerospace / Defense, Architecture / Engineering / Building, Oil & Gas, Power  and Telecom.

Need

The « Architecture / Engineering / Building » division wanted to offer its clients a cloud based platform of collaborative engineering, running in real time using Building Information Modeling (BIM) for their construction sites.
The building and construction industry is in fact moving more and more to collaborative or simultaneous engineering methods, to complete their projects successfully. Studies are showing that sequential engineering methods are by far less efficient, due to their overly predictive nature and lack of adaptability.
This major evolution in methodology is translated in concrete terms by the necessity to have solutions that enable sharing datas from a work project between all trades.
This sharing is made through common data model (or BIM) that centralizes all information and redistributes them according to a multipoint of view approach. In this way, collaboration is achieved with maximum fluidity with no digital break, eliminating retyping errors and information loss.

The goal of the project was to create a cloud platform to  allow multiple users – from various trades, each of them connected to their own devices (PC, Mobile, Tablet)  – to :

• work in a distributed way in highly heterogeneous environments,
• collaborate in a cooperative way during all the lifecycle of the works (from specification to implementation) using those digital datas,
• visualize and manipulate simultaneous digital model of work (3D plans or BIM).

Solution

A solution of construction sites and works based on DocDokuPLM plateform
After a short adaptation period done in agile mode, we have built a cloud platform that answered the requirement of the sector i.e. the digitalization of construction sites trade process, centered on BIM datas.

IFC format care
Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is a standardized and object oriented file format (ISO 16739 norm), used by the construction industry to exchange and share informations between softwares. It is the standard exchange format used commonly by softwares that enable working in BIM.
Our main task was to produce a plugin that can convert or import files under IFC standard to manage building or construction site effectivities as well as geometry.