Customer profile: Duna Aszfalt Zrt is one of Hungary’s largest local contractors, having about 1600 employees. The company is involved in infrastructure construction, including 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, they use low energy asphalt (LEA) methods in their work.
business challenge: Utilizing the most advanced building information modeling (BIM) methods and techniques for 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
- Rapidly process data to be used in the future
- 4x speedier excavation and road construction
- Keeping data consistent between exports
Implementing the BIM concept into their everyday work has resulted in significant improvements in quality, productivity, and efficiency of Duna Aszfalt Zrt, one of Hungary’s largest local contractors with more than 1600 employees.
The company is involved in every aspect of infrastructure construction, like roads, highway construction, environmental projects, and bridges. The name implies that Duna Aszfalt is a prominent company in asphalt technology, such as using low-energy (LEA) methods for 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 the survey as well as Ervin Bakos, who is the head of the modeling and design group of Duna Aszfalt to talk about their experiences of working using BIM and making use of Trimble solutions to achieve their goals.
In this article, our BIM management team of Duna Aszfalt tells us about their work and why they decided to use Trimble software to meet their goal of becoming the top BIM group in Hungary.
What’s the current state of the infrastructure industry in Hungary?
“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 says to us.
Concerning BIM maturity, the Hungarian Standard Institution has implemented more than 30 European and International BIM standards, and two have been translated into Hungarian. The government is assisting the market to find methods to meet the BIM requirements. Two Karolina and Beatrix were involved in creating the first BIM Handbook for Hungary at their previous job.
“But that handbook was mainly for building projects and there a lot of differences between building and infrastructure projects,” Beatrix highlights.
“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 building industry is quite diversifiable in the case of owners. There are a lot of private owners. In the case of railways and roads, it’s the majority of governmental agencies that are the project’s owners.
Karolina adds, “because the infrastructure industry is relying on governmental agencies it is also stable and can support the development of the BIM process.”
Details from the Road 83-project, where Duna Aszfalt Zrt is all-in on BIM
Duna Aszfalt is aiming high for VDC and BIM.
Although Duna Aszfalt is one of the most renowned contractors in Hungary, they are determined to be on the cutting edge of implementing new technologies and working methods. Since they’ve already adopted several technologies in the construction industry, like drones and machine control systems, their goal is to have an efficient process from design to construction. The typical scenario is that we receive a stack of drawings. Then surveyors on-site build digital models from those sketches by hand.
Ervin tells us, “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 describes.
Beatrix describes the company’s strategy and human aspects, “most people at the company are willing to make changes and appreciate the benefits of altering our methods of work. But as with all companies, change can be difficult. We don’t want dissuade people from BIM by imposing anything on them, rather we have a “flagship” project where we show that this really works, and from that, we spread the BIM methodology through the company.”
Duna Aszfalt’s office-to-field-to-office BIM workflow
Why Trimble Quadri?
In 2019, when Duna was launching our BIM plan, they began looking at various software options. They looked at options from different vendors but still needed to meet their needs for a shared 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 genuine BIM platform, as it offers complete support for models based on objects, and we no longer need to worry about files. The entire model is contained inside the model. It is constantly updated, and you have access to a fully-visualized 3D model that represents the actual data of the project. In terms of designing software, Novapoint has many more advantages than the other design software we’ve had experience with. Novapoint is far superior when it comes to handling larger models. It has no issues even with road projects of around 40 km, unlike other design software, where road models can’t be larger than 2 km before it gets too slow.
Another significant aspect of Quadri is the ability to connect with other options. For the case of our Road 83 project, we use data from Revit, Novapoint, and Civil 3D, and the Quadri connectors allow us to get the design information directly from different software programs without the need for file exports. This is exclusive to Quadri compared to other systems on the market, in which you have to use their portfolio to collaborate genuinely. Trimble is correct when it opens the Quadri Platform to other similar systems.