BIM for Owners and Facility Managers

Chapter 4 discussed the many ways in which BIM can improve the life of building owners and facility managers. In order to do so the chapter first discussed the reasons owners should care about BIM, highlighted several BIM tools that could be useful to owners, a framework for them to understand how to understand how to get BIM to work for them, and finally challenges they might encounter while trying to implement BIM. 

Before I started reading the article, I wondered why owners would doubt that BIM would be beneficiary for them, but I realized that I could not exactly explain why. This chapter provides specific answer to owners wandering why they should bother with BIM. As mentioned in the book, the industry is rapidly changing and BIM is becoming the norm for many architectural and engineering companies, and by familiarizing them selves with the capabilities of the program Owners could benefit from its use. The chapter mentions 7 drivers that should motivate owners and facilities manager to implement BIM into their work ethic:  

-The ability to perform early and periodic design assessment 
-The facility to evaluate complex facilities 
-Better schedule management 
-Attain a more sustainable building 
-More reliable cost estimates at every stage of the process
-More efficient building
-Better management of assets 

The chapter presented several tools that would allow owners to realize the above using BIM. The ones that I found most interesting were the ones discussing the possibility to obtain more accurate cost estimates using BIM because it resonated with my last co op experience. 

Last year, I worked in an architecture firm as a member of the structural engineering team. However, as part of my co op experience my supervisors made sure that I was aware of every step of the process; so I got to work with the building estimators. The whole office was using Revit, but so far we had only been using its architectural and structural capabilities. It was hard for the building estimators to come up with timely and accurate estimation for the multiple projects that were being worked on at the same time. As this was becoming a real problem for us, we had an consultant come in to propose some solutions. We learned that it was possible to Use Revit to generate fairly accurate estimates. It was a long and tedious process that required a lot of us to change our work ethic, but we were convinced that this change would only increase the overall efficiency of the company. The system took about 4 months to implement and the team was still working out some kinks when I left, but the early results were really promising. After the implementation the building estimators were able to produce their reports in half the time it took them before. That was not only great for our firm, but also the owners. Our clients were really glad to have timely estimates of the cost of their project as it allowed them to better plan for financing. 

BIM technologies are still fairly new in our field, but they have already made a tremendous difference in the way things are done. I believe that once all interested parties start to implement it in their work processes, the concept of intelligent buildings will reach new heights. 


COMMENTS:

Yoon: You discussed the fact that people in the industry that are used to do things one way are reluctant to see things change. Although I agree with you, I think that the chapter addressed that issue and presented convincing arguments. As stated in the book BIM had been adopted by more than 50% of building professionals in 2009 and I imagine this number is much higher today. I think these statistics shows that the benefit of implementation of BIM outweighs the discomfort of older generation in front of new technology.  



References:

Eastman, Chuck, et al. BIM handbook: A guide to building information modeling for owners, managers, designers, engineers and contractors. Wiley. com, 2011.