As BIM consultant to the US General Services Administration (GSA), Ghafari was invited to exhibit at the GSA Public Buildings Service Knowledge & Technology Showcase on May 11, 2010, in New Orleans. The event was attended by nearly 400 GSA Project Managers. At the showcase, Ghafari demonstrated how SmartBoard technology is being used to conduct team-oriented, interactive model integration on a Federal project in Jackson, Mississippi, and Sutter Health’s Castro Valley Medical Center in California, additionally displaying the consolidated Chicago Federal Center (CFC) Campus model.

The Sutter Health Castro Valley Medical Center project demonstrated how the SmartBoardTM & Big Room approach is helping the integrated team use model based collaboration to improve coordination, constructability, and target costing. Weekly, team-oriented model integration sessions help achieve virtual, 3D “as-builts” before construction. Ghafari’s experience on numerous manufacturing projects has shown that moving beyond “stick-built” traditions allows adoption of a host of downstream efficiency gains including: off-site fabrication, preassembly, Just-In-Time (JIT) delivery and installation. Bottom line results include reduced change orders from field coordination, as well as reduced costs and schedule with increased quality, safety,
and sustainability.

The Chicago Federal Center model showed how lean thinking and Edgewise technologies were combined to significantly improve scan-to-model efficiencies by importing automatically generated polygons into Revit – allowing Ghafari’s Architecture and Engineering team to model only what was needed, when it was needed, to support the CFC Plaza Restoration. The CFC model was recognizable to many of the GSA attendees given its multiple building, square block footprint and SparView coverage in February.