Sharing Knowledge

ATP and Plandata’s unconventional approach to the democratization of BIM standards

Is corona now leading to a BIM boom? Lars Oberwinter isn’t leaning his head quite so far out of the window ... but the BIM expert is convinced that the current situation is showing us more than ever that non-BIM-supported ways of working have already reached the limit of their capacity.

“Being able to synchronize an entire model with a single click rather than having to send infinite amounts of data back and forth makes a huge difference,” says Oberwinter. This has become particularly clear during the past few weeks while people have been working from their home offices.

The Managing Partner of the ATP subsidiary Plandata since the start of this year, Oberwinter has a somewhat unconventional objective for his business model: “We believe in crowd intelligence rather than isolated expertise. This is why we want to place the BIM standard that ATP has developed to such a high level during recent years at the disposal of as many market players as possible in an affordable way.” This readiness to share knowledge is common practice at ATP, which has already successfully opened up access to its knowledge platform BIMpedia. By democratizing its BIM standard, Plandata is addressing one of the central challenges facing the highly fragmented planning and building industry – especially in the German-speaking region. A further aim is to make ATP’s insights, tools, and setups as widely available as possible to small players in order to ensure that this collective knowledge can be gathered in one place in the interests of the building industry as a whole.

Oberwinter will also share his know-how at the up-and-coming BIM Congress on 13th May 2020, which will be fully digitalized due to corona. His lecture is entitled “Digital Quality Management 2.0 – how our mistakes really can make us wiser.”

