Deepen knowledge in Civil3D for BIM 5D in India

03 september 2018

Quest is an international transfer program which connects Arcadians from all over the world. The Quest program is sponsored by the Lovinklaan Foundation. Every week we are highlighting one of the stories of our employees who went on an exchange. In this blogpost we cover the Quest story of Jorge Moiño Vaamonde who traveled from Antwerp, Belgium to India.

Why did I apply for a Quest

My name is Jorge Moiño and I come from the Antwerp office in Belgium. I am part of the Cost Management team for infrastructure projects in Belgium and I am currently involved in the improvement of the BIM 5D implementation.

My aim was to get deeper knowledge on how models can help us to extract useful information to apply it to our cost estimates, to become more automated and data-friendly. This is the main reason I chose India, where I could meet Partha Sarkar, who is a BIM expert. We connected before in meetings via Skype, so this was a perfect opportunity to get to know him and the different modelling teams. It also was a great chance to get to know the best practices in Civil3D for linear projects made in India.

“This Quest was eye-opening on a lot of levels, both personally and professionally!”

Highlight of my Quest experience

 

The experience in India was extremely rich in a lot of ways: for me personally, it was very interesting to see different cultures and ways of working. On a professional level it showed me that collaboration and workflow worked out much better than on Skype for instance.

I am very grateful to everybody there, as all Indian colleagues were incredibly friendly and helpful at any time. I was even able to meet some colleagues I met before in Belgium, so it was really fun seeing each other again and having a nice time after work together.

Professionally, it was a good opportunity to share general visions to keep working from the distance and create a good network, learn whom to direct your questions and doubts to once they show up and reach the proper expert afterwards. Actually, I created an Indian skype contact list. It all started when I couldn’t really remember all names, so I made the list to be able to match faces with names and remember who was doing what. Now that I’m back in Belgium, this list is very useful to ask questions from time to time or even chat a little bit.

My Quest in one word

Enriching

Learnings and experiences

I was able to visit parts of projects where different teams are currently involved in, not only from Belgium, but also from the UK and US, which was especially useful for broadening my knowledge about highways and infrastructure projects. I also had the opportunity to meet some people working for Water Belgium, who gave me an overview of their work with BIM. In return, I presented them our aims about BIM, our current workflow related to cost management, how this workflow could improve our daily work and how India could be useful to enrich possible future collaborations. I also tested many models they are working on in order to look for different future solutions about quantity extraction on Civil3D.

It goes without saying that one week is not enough to get the desired results, but I was really happy with all the feedback, tests, network connections and experiences I got because of this Quest.

I would definitively recommend this experience to all Arcadians, and so I have already encouraged my colleagues in Antwerp. Once you have a global connection, via Yammer, Skype or similar channels on the intranet, just go for it. It will also help Arcadis to match workflows and visions all over the world.

Finally, I just would say Chaló Arcadis! and Kalmilengue!

The international transfer program Quest, which connects Arcadians from all over the world, is sponsored by the Lovinklaan Foundation.

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