Ralph Montague
BIM Goes Mainstream in Europe
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36% of the Western European industry participants in this research reported having adopted BIM. This can be compared to the 49% adoption rate in North America (2009).
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34% of Western European BIM users have over 5 years of experience using BIM versus only 18% in North America
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Architects are the primary adopters (47%) followed by engineers (38%) and contractors (24%).
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There is a striking difference in the adoption rate among contractors. BIM has only been embraced by 24% of Western European contractors, whereas BIM adoption has surged among North American contractors to 50%.
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Nearly 60% of total respondents are currently frequent users, meaning they use BIM on at least 30% of their projects, the number using it at that level could increase to 75% in the next two years.
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Contractors anticipate the most aggressive increase in implementation, with the frequent user population expected to grow from 11% today to 54% by 2012.
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74% of Western European BIM users report a positive perceived return on their overall investment in BIM, versus 63% of BIM users in North America.
Where are the Key Construction Industry Players?
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?
BIM is Here to Stay.
There is a global trend to working in BIM, that has been developing for about 20 years, but has really come into it’s own in the last 5 years. BIM software products are now offered by all the major design software suppliers like Autodesk, Microstation, Graphisoft, etc. The latest market survey, McGraw-Hill Construction SmartMarket 2009 Report ( "The Business Value of BIM: Getting Building Information Modelling (BIM) to the Bottom Line"), profiles the adoption of BIM in North America, showing that at least 50% of industry are now using BIM tools, a 75% increase since their last survey in 2007, with the biggest increase being amongst owners and contractors (300-400%). Many of the larger design/build contractors, client and government bodies in the US are now demanding that BIM be used on new projects.
BIM – A New Hope for our Profession.
Architects are in danger of making themselves more irrelevant by ignoring very real developments in technology, such as Building Information Modelling (BIM), as the new paradigm for delivering building projects.
Our profession is at a crossroads, faced with reduced fees, increased responsibility and higher client expectations. Traditional working procedures are simply not sustainable in this environment. It is vital that we adopt a new working model that performs more efficiently, delivers more valuable information and most importantly cuts costs. As an industry, we need to intelligently address the realities of what is happening in our market, and the pressure to compete in a global economy. Simply cutting overheads, reducing fees and profit margins, without a corresponding and fundamental change in the way we work, is not feasible in the long term. Finding more effective ways of working is key to our short term survival and long term competitiveness in the global market.
Any real solution has to focus on Production of Documentation - that area of our profession that has become increasingly time consuming and is responsible for the majority of our overhead costs. While architects may want to more spend time on their areas of expertise in design, project and business management, in reality they end up spending too many hours (or vast sums of money) on laborious preparation of documentation, checking, re-checking, cross-referencing and risking costly mistakes.
BIM is a technology that directly addresses the inadequacies of current documentation systems. All the 2D drawings, schedules, and specifications normally required to communicate your design, are produced directly from this single BIM model, ensuring fully consistent and reliable building information at all times, improving the quality of documentation, eliminating errors and omissions, and significantly reducing production costs and time. BIM works the way an architect thinks, exploring design in 3D with the added benefits of being able, at any stage, to provide rendered 3D images, shadow studies or animated walkthroughs, critical and accurate analytical data information (areas, volumes, material quantities etc), all to promote a clearer understanding of ideas to clients and consultants, for better decision making and collaboration.
BIM Supports Better Project Collaboration and New ways of Working.
“...the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results...”
Albert Einstein
The days of large practices with all resources in-house, are over in Ireland, and if our recent experience has taught us anything, it’s that the model of creating large inefficient and all consuming organisations is not sustainable for our small market. Our profession has developed a vast amount of experience over the “boom” years, but unfortunately this experience is now largely dormant and fragmented. We need to collectively embrace new and innovative working models, where smaller specialist practices can work together in mutually beneficial ways, combining individual expertise as required to extend the collective capacity and resource to efficiently deliver projects in a global market.
The willingness of industry partners to embrace and collaborate on projects using BIM, will create new opportunities and a new future for our industry. We need to see smaller specialist companies coming together in synergistic ways. Like other industries, we need to start outsourcing elements of work to specialist who are more effective at what they do, and who can more efficiently control costs and output.
BIM software facilitates outsourcing and promotes this kind of collaborative working model. It resolves most of the error checking and coordination issues, that traditional required all design and production staff to work in the same building. By using the remote working capabilities of modern internet technology, smaller more efficient groups can now easily collaborate on bigger projects. With BIM, the production of logical elements, or components of projects, can easily be carried out in isolation of the overall project, which can then be re-assembled into an overall BIM model centrally managed by a much smaller in-house team. BIM is providing an opportunities for “production of documentation” to become a specialist function, apart from the overall design and project management, so that the costly overheads traditionally associated with this function can be transferred to and control by others.
