Tuesday 23 May 2017

Driving Factors for BIM Adoption

What's driving your BIM adoption?

From, my experience I have found that there are some key factors driving BIM adoption in the AEC industry.

BIM is an extension of the Design, Construction and operation processes, utilizing a collaborative approach to managing data at all the stages of construction. The Design and Construction industry globally have seen a decline in the profitability over the last decade resulting in the demand for innovation and improvement on how we design and deliver buildings and infrastructure.
We are already seeing the adoption of BIM playing a factor in the AECO industry for a number of reasons, for example in Africa the drive to adopt BIM is being driven by the Quantity Surveyors, in North America we’ve recently seen a shift in BIM utilization from Architects driving BIM to the Construction companies utilizing BIM for construction management including quantification, construction sequence and staging and collaboration helping to reduce time and cost. 
Projects are difficult at the best of times, everyone is concerned about cost over runs, risk mitigation and ever ballooning scope of work. Adopting BIM can be challenging, it changes the conventional design process that we are all use too. 

The conventional process is broken and inefficient for the needs of today’s high demand projects. We have to collaborate more effectively, produce more efficiently and deliver a high quality package to our clients.

 When a project succeeds we all succeed

There are a number of driving factors that play an important role in the successful adoption of Building Information Modeling.

Client Demand.
BIM is becoming a requirement on more and more projects as our clients develop an understanding of the benefits of BIM. As our clients are educating themselves on BIM they are demanding the project be completed utilizing BIM so they can take advantage of the many benefits including sustainability (social responsibility), workplace environment. Clients are quite often willing to pay more to achieve these needs, however they will demand a high level of BIM from all parties.
BIM Mandate. 
Were seeing more and more countries and organizations mandating BIM as part of their RFP's. Government authorities both Regional and National as well as International companies mandating BIM as they see the long and short term benefits of a BIM project. 

Competitive Advantage:
As the use of BIM is becoming more commonplace in the design industry those who have adopted BIM are slowly loosing their competitive advantage. However, as BIM becomes more prolific companies who are utilizing the BIM beyond generating "construction drawings" are seeing a competitive advantage as they can deliver "value added" services as well as "billable" additional services. 
Value added could be as simple as generating Stereoscopic views for use in Google cardboard which can be generated very easily and quickly to additional billable services could include higher level of VR engagement,  marketing uses, building operations use etc. 

What are your driving factors and look for additional area's you can utilize BIM to enhance your business model, opportunities are numerous...

Sc.