Back
It is my great honour to be elected Chairman of the BS Division for Session 2022/2023. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all Past Chairmen for their distinguished leadership, and also to our Committee Members, Observers and Helpers for their great contribution to our Division.
With the continuous efforts exerted by our Past Chairmen and Committees over the years, the membership base of the BS Division has expanded to more than 5,000 members and is now ranked third among all the divisions in the Institution. This is really inspiring.
We have all been suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020. However, our BS engineers have never ceased fighting to combat COVID-19. A prominent example is the Working Group on Implementing Requirement on Air Change or Air Purifiers in Dine-in Restaurants. Our Past Chairman chaired the Working Group and served as members.
As BS engineers, we are not just looking to enhance human comfort and save energy; now it is more important to control infection to protect lives.
With the improvement in the COVID-19 situation, we are committed to organising more physical events in this session. We will be collaborating with other professional institutions, other HKIE Divisions, and the universities to provide various events to our members and the trades.
The planned events in this session will include, but are not limited to Joint Seminars and Technical Visits, the Hong Kong Joint Symposium (HKJS) 2022, the Joint Comprehensive Certificate Courses (JCCC) on Fire Services Systems 2022, our BS One Day Seminar 2023, the Water Conference 2023, a Joint Women in Building Services Engineering event, a Joint Sports event, STEM and Student Liaison Group events, Outstanding Student Awards, and our Annual Dinner.
We are also supporting the Institution for the big event of “Hong Kong Engineers Week 2023”.
As you can see, this session will be a busy one. Nevertheless, I am sure our Committee will provide full support for all our planned events, and devote their best efforts to the Division. We are looking forward to meeting you again in the coming events.
A seminar on the captioned topic was jointly organised by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Hong Kong Chapter, Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers Hong Kong Region and the BS Division on 28 September 2022 via Zoom.
Mr Isaac Lee, the BIM Manager and SMART Manager of Kerry Properties and Mr Simon Ng, Head of BIM in China State Construction Engineering Hong Kong were invited as the speakers. Around 450 members from the institutions participated in the event.
BIM has been widely adopted for the building design and the construction industry. The two invited BIM experts from different backgrounds shared their hands-on experience of implementing BIM in different projects. The seminar focused on the expectation gap for the BIM process in the industry, maximising the values of BIM in projects and construction management and the difficulties faced when applying BIM in private developments.
At the beginning of the webinar, Mr Ng and Mr Lee introduced us to their BIM journeys in a major local main contractor and a leading local building owner.
The BIM-enabled Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) process encourages early collaboration and information sharing among the entire project team during the schematic design stage and design development stage. Although the workflow may involve extra effort at these two stages, the overall design and construction process with BIM support may take less time overall than without BIM support.
With the BIM model and an information sharing environment, errors can be identified earlier and followed up with design changes. Also, the effort spent in construction, procurement and operation stages are less than in the current Design, Bid and Build (DBB) system.
BIM not only smoothens the overall workflow, but also reduces the total life cycle carbon footprint as well as helping to achieve carbon neutrality.
The seminar ended with a fruitful question-and-answer session where participants and the speakers actively exchanged views. On behalf of the institutions, we would like to express our deep gratitude to Mr Lee and Mr Ng for delivering such an informative seminar.