An introduction to schedule templates and data standards in Building Information Modeling

Learn how to integrate schedules and data standards into your BIM project and get an overview of the benefits that they bring to your design workflow.

Building Information Modeling – or BIM – is defined as an information model, consisting of potentially multiple data sources, elements of which can be shared across all stakeholders and maintained throughout a building’s life cycle. When implementing BIM in a specific project, it’s important to integrate the right schedules in order to gain the best possible understanding of your project. To help with this, Grundfos has developed a range of schedule templates for every product group.

In this course, we’re going to introduce you to the various schedule templates and how they can be beneficial for your BIM project. We’ll also present a variety of data standards and show how these can help give you a much better understanding of your project.

But before we dive into these data standards and schedule templates, let’s quickly introduce you to Autodesk Revit. Briefly put, Autodesk Revit is one of the key drafting tools in the BIM design workflow and our focus platform for this course.

And it’s also the tool in which we find our schedules and schedule templates. Schedule view templates are view templates that apply to schedules, material take-offs, sheet lists, view lists, note blocks, and views created from an assembly. Schedule views are created and modified as any other view in Autodesk Revit. This includes being transferred with project standards. 

To help with the process of scheduling, Grundfos has created a range of data standards and schedule templates, all of which are based on Grundfos pumps. There’s a schedule template for every product group meaning that you can find pretty much any kind of template that suits your needs. 

Let’s say that we’re looking to integrate a schedule template for Grundfos MAGNA3. First of all, simply head to Grundfos Product Center and find the relevant product family. Then, select Grundfos MAGNA3 and you’ll be given a variety of data standards to choose from. 

No project is the same. And it’s important to acknowledge that there is no global standard for what data should be included in any project. Based on that, Grundfos has created several versions of BIM assets that can be downloaded from Grundfos Product Center. 

These different versions are all modelled according to some of the most dominating guidelines such as BIMMEPaus, CIBSE PDT and COBie. That way, you can expect that the object properties are set according to the most in-demand needs. If you are in doubt about which data standard to select, a safe bet is to go with the default version.

When you’ve downloaded the object from Grundfos Product Center, you can load the product family and proceed to work on your project. And this is where schedule templates come into play. Grundfos supplies a variety of schedule templates that not only deliver configurations explaining product functionality, but also save specifiers the time and effort needed to create manual schedules. It is, however, important to stress that these are just templates and you can of course manually create schedules if you’d rather that. 

Once you’ve found the right schedule template, simply load it into to your Revit project. By integrating schedule templates into your project, you’ll get a simple overview on a sheet rather than a complex amount of data that, for some, may appear intangible.  

By doing this, you’ll get full pump and component information allowing you to learn everything you need to know about your Grundfos MAGNA3 including the most requested electrical, identity, operational and mechanical data.

That just about covers it. But before we finish, let’s recap what we’ve been through.

First of all, a data standard applies to data for the entire model, allowing a holistic approach from an early stage.

Secondly, data standards are set up according to in-demand data schemes, meaning that you’re likely to find one according to your needs.

Next, there are schedule templates for every product group, allowing you easily to find a suitable match.

And finally, schedule templates provide you with all necessary data, saving you the time and effort of creating a manual schedule. 

Course overview

Modules
Modules: 2
Completion time
Completion time: 15 minutes
Difficulty level
Difficulty level: Intermediate