Apr 2

Written by: Deke Smith
4/2/2011 

We have long been talking about BIM and very slowly it has been gaining ground. In 2009 McGraw-Hill Construction indicated that usage had reached just under 50%. Clearly that is much higher now. Owners are awakening to the fact that there are huge savings in working out problems electronically in a model instead of working them out in the field later on. The more detailed the model the better the results.

In the Spring 2011 issue of the Journal of Building Information Modeling (JBIM) just released and available at COFES this year is an article by Dr. Raymond Issa which identifies the savings in six projects that "could have been" attained by using BIM to avoid change orders. The ROI's ranged from an understandable 16% to one project that had been in significant trouble where the ROI was 1654%! and could have saved $3.4M and a 221 day delay. Read the article on page 22. It is eye opening.

Clearly everyone is not at the same level of maturity with BIM, but with those kinds of numbers owners and practitioners are not going to be sleeping for long...or if they are sleeping, they may never wake up as the train will have left the station.