BIM gives firms a competitive edge
ANDERS ARTHUR* explains how companies can effectively integrate BIM with their existing CAD environment in order to maximise productivity in an increasingly competitive environment.
01 January 2012
THE construction industry is rapidly evolving as owners demand increasingly complex projects to be delivered at a faster pace and at a lower cost.
According to the Confederation of International Constructor Industries (CICA), the worldwide construction industry, involving contractors of all sizes, represents a global turnover of $4.8 trillion and employs around 110 million employees.
“The contribution of the construction industry to the world’s GDP is estimated at nine per cent,” CICA states. “But the impact on the world economy at large is much higher: investments in adequate infrastructure, housing and energy efficiency are vital to economic growth, job creation, mitigating energy issues, fighting poverty, improving the health and well-being of citizens while providing significant inputs on quality of life, health and climate consequences.”
Yet, with coordination, material, and labour inefficiencies consuming up to 30 per cent of construction costs worldwide, construction companies of all sizes must find solutions for a range of critical business problems.
Construction companies first need to ensure they win more work. In the face of global economic strain, fewer construction projects are available. This increases competitive pressures on firms actively working to win new business.
Companies also need to focus on improving the bottom line. As competition grows, they must be able to provide more accurate material quantifications and cost estimates – or risk reduced profits on projects that exceed budgets.
Another key requirement is to streamline productivity. Successful adoption of lean construction principles requires that companies evaluate projects holistically to identify opportunities to reduce costs and maximise productivity.
Organisations across the sector also need to reduce the number of errors they make. Project delivery timelines are shrinking, making it increasingly critical to manage a project with as few time- and cost-intensive RFIs (requests for information) and change orders as possible. They must also ensure that they deliver on time. The coordination and execution of complex building projects is a difficult and time-consuming task. Seemingly small setbacks in scheduling have the potential to create significant delays in project delivery.
So how can construction companies achieve all of this?
The best way is to start getting up to speed with building information modelling (BIM). BIM is an intelligent model-based process that provides insight for creating and modelling building projects faster, more economically and with less environmental impact.
As BIM mandates increase and building owners play a more active role in specifying project requirements, adopting BIM could help construction companies to win more work. As BIM continues to become a standard in the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) industry, firms that promote themselves as ‘BIM ready’ are far outpacing their competitors.
From theory to practice
The key question that these organisations increasingly face, however, is how can they find a way of effectively integrating BIM with their existing CAD environment which allows them to derive business advantage in an increasingly competitive marketplace?
To be effective, such solutions need to be capable of helping construction companies to address their workflow challenges, create better buildings with intelligent model-based design and market their ideas more successfully through visualisations and walkthroughs, and better informed design and construction decisions with integrated analysis to simulate design intent before the build process begins.
These solutions must also be able to help users to create consistently higher quality construction documentation and ‘as built’ models to ensure greater control over building outcomes with valuable insight across the design cycle.
Critically, they must be able to address the five key elements of any construction project: design, visualise, analyse, document and build. In the design phase, users are essentially looking for intelligent model-based design tools that add value across the design. Tools like the Autodesk Building Design Suite can play a key role here, essentially allowing design teams to address bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the design process, to share data and communicate and collaborate more effectively throughout the building design process.
Another key focus for construction professionals is the requirement to simulate building performance in order to inform design and construction decisions, and increasingly today, to conduct lighting and energy analyses to inform sustainable design decisions or to use intelligent information inherent in the model to gain greater visibility into constructability.
Design and construction users also need tools for the creation of high-quality documentation that enables them to communicate more effectively with colleagues from different disciplines.
In the build phase, the key is to gain greater control over project outcomes with improved insight across the building lifecycle. Users can help achieve this by ensuring coordinated building systems and structural elements use construction modelling tools to derive more detailed insight before building work begins.
Migrating to a new approach
The huge size and scale of the construction industry highlights its important role in driving the global economy. Investment levels are high and increasing. Yet, the fact that around 30 per cent of construction costs can be attributed to waste demonstrates the potential for projects that deliver higher levels of efficiency, to drive profit.
Contractors are increasingly leading the value chain and concentrating, above all, on driving efficiencies through a focus on cost, schedule and constructability. So, for software vendors serving the sector, there has to be a focus on delivering software and services that increase construction companies’ ability to win and deliver projects with more predictability and less risk. Ultimately this is what the BIM concept enables them to do.
* Anders Arthur is the regional director, Middle East and Africa for Autodesk, a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software.
