Profile of the Customer: Duna Aszfalt Zrt is one of Hungary’s largest local contractors, employing about 1600 employees. The company is involved in every aspect of infrastructure construction, like road and highway development, green projects, bridges, and environmental projects. Duna Aszfalt is also a prominent company in the field of asphalt technology. For instance, the use of low-energy asphalt (LEA) methods in their asphalt work.
business challenge: Implementing top-of-the-line building information modeling (BIM) methodologies and technology to infrastructure and civil construction projects
Solution:
- Trimble Earthworks Grade Control Platform
- Trimble Roadworks Grade Control Platform
- Trimble Business Center Software
- Trimble SX10 Scanning Total Station
- Trimble WorksManager Software
- Trimble WorksOS
- Trimble MX50 Mobile Mapping System
- Trimble Sitevision
- Trimble Quadri
- Trimble Novapoint
- Trimble Tilos
- Trimble Connect
Benefits:
- Accurately and quickly capture working conditions, site conditions, and the as-built information
- Process data quickly to make it usable in the future
- 4x faster excavation speed and road construction
- Keeping data consistent between exports
The introduction of the BIM concept into their daily activities has brought about significant improvements in productivity, quality, and efficiency at Duna Aszfalt Zrt, one of Hungary’s most prestigious local contractors with more than 1600 employees.
The company deals with the entire spectrum of infrastructure construction, including road and highway development, ecological projects, and bridges. As the name suggests, Duna Aszfalt is also a top company in the field of asphalt technology. For instance, the use of low-energy asphalt (LEA) methods in their asphalt work.
We sat down to chat about the work of Beatrix Szabo, BIM Manager, Karolina Tiszavolgyi, who is the head of the team for a survey, as well as Ervin Bakos, the head of the modeling and design department in Duna Aszfalt to talk about their experiences of working using BIM and making use of Trimble solutions to achieve their goals.
In this article in this article, in this article, the BIM management team from Duna Aszfalt tells us about their work and why they decided to use Trimble software to achieve their goal of becoming the top BIM group in Hungary.
What is the state of the industry of infrastructure in Hungary in the present moment?
“Since the 1990s there has been a lot of focus to upgrade the road network after long times of neglected road maintenance. It is the national road administration that builds and maintains most roads,” Ervin informs us.
In terms of BIM maturity, the Hungarian Standard Institution has adopted over 30 European as well as International BIM standards, and two of the standards have been translated into Hungarian. The government is assisting the market to find ways to comply with the BIM requirements. Each of Karolina and Beatrix participated in the development of the first BIM Handbook for Hungary in their former workplaces.
“But that handbook was mainly for building projects and there a lot of differences between building and infrastructure projects,” Beatrix notes.
“Infrastructure projects, such as road projects are always lengthy and require a lot of data. The data come from a lot of sources and are dispersed so we need a different approach when applying BIM to our business,” Ervin says. Ervin. The construction industry is quite varied in terms of owners, with lots of private owners. In the case of railways and roads, it’s mostly governmental authorities that are the owners of projects.
Karolina adds, “because the infrastructure industry is relying on governmental agencies it is also stable and can support the development of the BIM process.”
A detail from the Road-83-project in which Duna Aszfalt Zrt gets involved with BIM
Duna Aszfalt is aiming high in the area of VDC and BIM.
Although Duna Aszfalt is one of the top contractors in Hungary, and they are determined to be on the cutting edge of the implementation of new technologies and methods of work, and since they’ve already implemented several technologies in the construction industry, including drones and machine control systems Their goal is to have more efficient workflows from concept to construction. In the normal scenario, we are given a bunch of drawings. Afterward, the surveyors working on the site build digital models from those drawings manually.
Ervin informs us that “we want a more controlled and direct data flow from design to construction, and that’s what our strategy is all about.”
“To be able to change our processes, we have established two teams dedicated to this transformation of our business. In 2020, we created a 3D modeling team with 3 designers and a 3D survey team with 4 surveyors. We would like to further expand our department as we have more and more tasks to do,” Karolina says.
Beatrix describes the company’s strategy as well as its human aspects, “most people at the company are open to changes and are aware of the benefits of altering our methods of work. However that’s true for all companies. change can be difficult. We don’t want discourage people from BIM by imposing any rules to them, instead we have a “flagship” project where we show that this really works, and from that, we spread the BIM methodology through the company.”
Why Trimble Quadri?
In the year 2019, as Duna began to implement our BIM approach, the company started looking at various software options. They looked at options from other vendors, but they were not able to meet their requirements for a common data environment.
“In my previous workplace, I was in brief contact with Quadri and Novapoint and we decided to contact Trimble about it. So in 2019, we got some evaluation licenses from Trimble and also very good support from them when we were starting to test. We tried out several types of software before. We found out that Quadri is a real BIM software that perfectly fits our BIM strategy,” Ervin says. Ervin.
Quadri is a real BIM platform since it has complete support for models based on objects, which means we don’t have to worry about files anymore. All is inside the model. It is constantly updated, and we can have access to a fully visualized 3D model that represents the actual information about the project. With regards to designing software, Novapoint excels over the other design software we’ve used. Novapoint is far superior in handling large models. It has no issues even when it comes to road projects that are more than 40 kilometers, as opposed to the other software for designing where road models aren’t able to be larger than 2 km before they get too slow.
Another thing that’s positive about Quadri is its openness to other options. As part of Road 83, our Road 83 project, we make use of data from Revit, Novapoint, and Civil 3D, and the Quadri connectors allow us to get the design information directly from various software without having to export files. This is a unique feature of Quadri in comparison with other systems available that are available, in which you have to use software from their portfolios for working in a collaboration manner. Trimble is on the right track when it comes to opening this Quadri system to different similar systems.
How do I collaborate, Quadri or Novapoint?
“We are almost surprised how fast our implementation has been. It is really easy to learn to use both Quadri and Novapoint,” Karolina says. Karolina before continuing to discuss the implementation. “We also want to thank Trimble for their excellent support during this period. They are always happy to help us no matter what.”
“We mainly use Novapoint Road design, but also the Water & Sewer module. To get a better model we also added road markings and some road signs. Today there is no localized version for Novapoint Road Markings and Novapoint Road Sign in Hungary but we used another country localization for that,” Ervin informs us.
Beatrix says, “Quadri is a total game-changer for us because we have control of what is done, when and by who, Everyone in the project has instant access to the model data and can extract volumes, machine control data, or check what has been done.”