OK, not to drag this out, but I went and looked a the links provided by Mattias on the 27th (thank you). In all honesty, I was not aware of these new BIM (Building Information Management) capabilities being added to NX. That being said, what everyone needs to know is that this does NOT make NX suitable for use as an AEC (Architectural Engineering Construction) system, at least not in the sense of being used to design buildings to the level of details needed to erect a structure from scratch.
From what I read in the links and what I know we were attempting to develop NX for when I was still with the company, it would appear to me that the BIM tools are intended to help layout and manage factory and manufacturing facilities. In other words, to 'model' existing structures, NOT design new ones. This would be done so as to allow for the layout of production facilities including such things as assembly lines, robotic work cells, material flow routes in a factory, etc.
Let me give you a real world example. Back when I was working as an actual machine designer, before CAD was even available, I worked for a company that designed and manufactured large chemical and food processing equipment. I worked in the food division where he designed and manufactured commercial bakery equipment, primary for pan breads (loaves of sliced bread and hamburger/hot dog buns). Now these machines could be be very large, often larger than Buddy's 35' X 38' example (some of our tunnel ovens were over 100' long). Now in the vast majority of cases, the buildings where these bakeries were being installed already existed. In fact, most of them had often been used for some other purpose, such as a grocery warehouse or some other such structure and even in buildings which were originally built to house a bakery operation, we were often coming in and replacing 50 and 60 year old production lines. Only once in my 11 years working in that job was I ever involved in helping to get a production line up and running in a brand new building.
Now as part of my job, and others who worked for the company, was that we needed to know about the building where our machinery was going to be installed and often the architectural blueprints provided by the customer (and remember, this back in the days when everything was on paper) were out-of-date as changes had been made the building. On more than one occasion I had to fly to some city and using a 50' steel tape, a quadrille pad and pencil, I would have to sketch out an 'as-built' drawing, which I would then have to go back and layout to scale so that we could position our production machinery and the necessary conveyors systems tying them all together (my first job as a new engineer was working in the conveyor division). We also needed to know where the various services tied into the building like, power, water, gas (after all, you had to bake the bread) and sometime steam and HVAC connections. Now we drew these out on paper with enough detail so as to be able install the machinery and make the appropriate connections and such, but these drawing were never what you would have needed to build the structures, rather we were 'modeling' what we needed to do OUR jobs, which was to design, manufacture and install a commercial bakery production line.
Now, a few years before I left that company and went to work for McDonnell Douglas, we bought a Unigraphics (the precursor to NX) CAD system which we used to design and manufacture our machinery. And yes, we also used it so make those layouts showing the buildings and facilities where that machinery was going to be installed. In fact, I spent about half my time writing GRIP programs to automate as much of this process as possible including programs to draw-up what we called 'installation drawings' which showed how some of our larger pieces of equipment, like one of those 100' long ovens, would fit into the area of a building where it was going to be erected and how and where it would connected to the building services, including sometime where and how it would be attached to the actual walls and structural aspects of a building. Now this was all back in the later 70's when most all of CAD was still basically 2D and our output was still paper, just that they were produced on a plotter and not a drawing board.
From what I've read, it would seem that these new BIM tools would be the sort of thing that we could have used back in those days, only now it would be in full 3D, and it could used where ever a customer needed to integrate their products, either at an existing customer's site or perhaps even their own if they're using NX to design and layout a factory production system. But again, they're no going to use NX to design a new building, other than perhaps to produce proposals of spatial utilization which would be taken by the architect as a starting point using a true AEC system.
Anyway, I hope I've made it more clear as to what it is that I think NX's role would be in work like this and how it's probably going to used, even as new capabilities are being added which go way beyond the tools that we had 'back in the old days'.
John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
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