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 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.
