While this still holds true centuries later, things have become a lot faster and easier for those working in the built environment and construction sectors. Why? Because the construction, real estate, and facilities asset management industry has been revolutionised by the development of digital tools: tools such as Building Information Modeling (BIM).
RIB 4.0 is a complete construction cloud platform developed by RIB Software that connects all people, processes, and data in one centralized platform. RIB 4.0 combines RIB’s iTWO 4.0 technologies with Microsoft Azure, to offer a first class integrated 5D BIM construction management solution for contractors, developers, and owners to speed up their digital transformation journey.
With deep industry know-how and innovation with 5D BIM, BI, AI and cloud technologies, RIB 4.0 connects all people, process and data in one place. This gives architecture, construction, real estate, and engineering, (ACRE) professionals the insight and tools to more efficiently plan, design, construct, and manage buildings and infrastructure.
But BIM projects often have a tendency to become complex very quickly, eating up development time and money before it actually delivers any projects! That’s why we’ve been working towards automating many of the processes involved in the delivery of these complex systems here at Intwo – helping deliver and manage this infrastructure-based software platform.
RIB Software has long understood the inherent challenges and limitations ACRE professionals face. Typically, the BIM process has involved stitching a range of different disciplines together using legacy and add-on software, and it can take many hours of consultant time to pull into one package.
To help make many of these integration processes easier, we worked with RIB Software to help them deliver their same trusted iTWO platform, but now hosted on a cloud infrastructure: RIB 4.0. When using our automation processes, implementation is now 10 times faster.
With RIB 4.0, virtual and physical processes become aligned – allowing users to maintain a full overview of their projects and assets at all times. Not only does this knowledge accumulation enable users to find the best possible solutions at optimized cost levels, but it ensures that decision-making is based on real-time information.
Following intensive development, the Intwo team is now able to offer a fully DevOps-based automated rollout of new RIB 4.0 customer instances. RIB 4.0 has been an important reference project and provided the proof of concept of the model. Increasingly, customers want a SaaS solution for software – one that’s based on best practices and can be deployed at the touch of a button.
Up until now, the classic form of Managed Services Provider’s (MSP) consulting services has been based on drawing up a design for a solution, incorporating extensive input from several consultants and teams, cross-referral and mix of processes and software architecture, before being handed over to operations for implementation.
For sure, we still need the discovery phase, where we take specific parameters with customers, but this is compressed as an exercise. We then essentially plug into products, before automation produces the customer specific solution – such as the number of servers deployed and software options. This creates a new delivery-focused business model.
Through Azure DevOps and significant research and development investment on our part, we have created a SaaS model to help deliver complex software architecture and functional requirements for RIB Software. In addition, the digital and automated process delivers tangible advantages to the end customer as well – including cost reductions.
The main benefit for end users is actually the speed of deployment. In the past when they wanted a proof of concept from RIB Software, for example, it was a drawn-out process because of the various stages required. However now, even at the initial stage, customers can look at the proof of concept (PoC) before they buy.
Also, on the infrastructure layer, the products benefit from a cycle of continuous improvement. End users won’t see a difference in the product but will experience enhancements and improvements in terms of speed, security, and scalability.
When new functionality becomes available, the platform will be updated automatically. Our automation supports any version of software customers want to run, and ensures users get new platform features quickly, with every regularly scheduled update, compared to requesting things that can take a long time to develop and even longer to implement.
We know it can all sound complex from the outside looking in, but to give an analogy, we compare our operation to a Tesla factory. Each process of design and production is automated. New models can be architected based on set parameters. With no need for armies of personnel, from design to manufacturing, costs are massively reduced.
So, taking the analogy further, we are able to produce models for a range of customers, who in turn, as vendors, provide the best-in-class solutions – in our case, for the dynamic world of BIM as a key tool for the construction of smart buildings, cities, highways, and the built environment.
In short, we put software companies in the fast lane for the delivery of excellence.
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