Our construction industry is in crises, and yet key industry players remain blissfully unaware, or disinterested, in developments taking place in other countries around the world, where the industry are facing up to meet similar challenges. If anyone is willing to pull their head out of the sand of recession for a minute, and do a bit of research, you’ll find a revolution is happening, with the adoption of new technologies and procurement methods that are drastically changing the cost and delivery time of infrastructure projects. With 20-30% potential savings on overall construction costs reported, you have to wonder why our industry is not grabbing this with both hands. 

A report in the Economist Magazine in 2000 stated that 30% of construction cost can be attributed to waste in the field, due to coordination errors, wasted material, labour inefficiencies and other problems in the current construction approach. To address these issues. the US have lead a revolution by adopting technologies like Building Information Modelling (BIM) and procurement procedures such as Integrated project Delivery (IPD), Lean Construction. An independent market survey by McGraw Hill Construction in 2009, showed that almost 50% of the industry are already working in this way, and yet our own industry hasn’t even begun to consider this. 

Stanford University, Centre for Integrated Facilities Engineering (CIFE, 2007) published figures based on a study of 32 major projects using BIM, outlining some of the key benefits of these systems:

• Up to 40% elimination of unbudgeted change.
• Cost estimation accuracy within 3%.
• Up to 80% reduction in time taken to generate a cost estimate.
• A savings of up to 10% of the contract value through clash detections.
• Up to 7% reduction in project time.

The cumulative effect of the above benefits could lead to 20-30% savings on construction costs - no wonder the McGraw Hill survey reported a 300-400% increase in BIM adoption by owners and contractors between 2007 and 2009. To realize these benefits, project teams have to learn to work together in a more integrated way and this is going to have a profound effect on our current procedures, procurement methods and agreements. Our industry needs to get up to speed in these processes, or risk being left behind in the global market. 

 Back in Ireland, we find the adoption of BIM is very poor, and talking to senior industry leaders about implementing these systems, you find many have never even heard of BIM. Others are delaying implementation because it is not being requested by clients, and feel that since professional fees have been negotiated down to incredibly low values, they are not willing to put in any additional investment into new technologies (even though they could achieve personal productivity gains through adopting these).

 There seems to be very little communication between the main industry partners on this subject. Architects, Engineers, Surveyors, Project Managers, and construction Solicitors should all be discussing this at high level, agreeing procedures and collaborative forms of agreement that will facilitate the use of the technologies and processes. If clients, development agencies and government bodies knew about the potential benefits of utilizing these new technologies and better forms of project delivery, then surely they would be asking for this in their procurement contracts (as is happening in countries like the US, Northern Europe, and Asia). The absence of any mention of these systems, in either policy or briefing documents, suggests that the decision makers of our industry remain blissfully unaware of the potential benefits.

 So our construction industry remains broken - buildings cost too much, and take too long to build, with enormous inefficiencies in our collective processes.  To put it plainly, clients are being sold an outdated and expensive procurement system that is incredibly wasteful, simply because they haven’t asked for anything better. 

 Take the “Singapore Building Authority” as an example in contrast, who have clearly understood the potential benefits of these new technologies, and have established a technology fund that will contribute about €40,000 to each project team who elects to implement BIM on a project, to cover the cost of software, hardware & training. This provides a clear incentive to the industry to remain at the top of their game, with the ultimate benefit accruing to the client, with a potential of 20-30% saving on their capital expenditure programme, and getting better designed, easier to manage buildings. Where is this kind of forward thinking in our government and our industry?