Week 3 - BIM for Owners and Facility Managers

D. Barbalace

Group C was required to read up on the impact that Building Information Modeling is expected to have on owners and facility managers as its popularity continues to rise.

Before BIM became a major player in the industry a few years ago, design drawings and as-builts really only ever had any importance in the design, construction, maintenance and renovation phases of a building's life.  Even then, one change during construction or any large renovation would often render the previous drawing set useless.  Owners and facility managers rarely had any reason to use these documents, especially since as-builts are often complicated and difficult to read for those not in the construction or engineering industry.

Recent advancements in BIM technologies have completely transformed the way owners and facility teams deal with their buildings.  BIM systems (especially ones implemented very early in the design phase) significantly increase a building's worth for a myriad of reasons.  The difference in value between traditional drawings and BIM modeling over a buildings life cycle can be seen in the following diagram:

As you can see, one BIM model can be utilized throughout every phase of a building's life cycle, which allows its value to increase consistently and then remain useful even after construction is complete.  The traditional paper based process loses value between every phase and then becomes significantly less applicable to facilities operations while the building is in use.

The major benefits that BIM offers owners are as follows:

• Cheaper initial costs.  Decreased design & construction time lower labor costs.
• Owner requested changes that would normally cause setbacks can be taken into account immediately.
• Asset management.
• Improved maintenance with integrated structural and HVAC models.
• Reduce energy consumption with energy models.
• Educating the project team with interactive BIM reviews.
• Communicate more easily with stakeholders.

While there are a ton more benefits of incorporating BIM into the design process, I believe that the list above illustrates the most general and most useful benefits for an owner or facilities team.

Sources:

Chuck Eastman, Paul Teicholz, Rafael Sacks, Kathleen Liston; “Bim Handbook, a Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers, and Contractors” Second Edition, Chapter 5; Second Edition 2011


Comment on Matt Morimoto's post (http://ae-510-ay13-14.blogspot.com/2014/01/bim-tools-and-parametric-modeling.html):

Matt: I'm commenting on your post because you used a .gif and I thought it was cool. I thought you 
made a good point about the benefits of parametric modeling. Being able to make changes quickly is essential for a designer with a tight schedule, and reactive models are incredibly helpful when adjusting interior layouts or changing parameters in an analysis program. It used to be a huge pain to change one wall in a model because you would usually have to re-adjust the adjacent walls and spaces to accommodate the change. Often times it had a ripple affect and you could find yourself going through the entire model making adjustments. Now, architects can actually bring their laptops to meetings and make changes as requested because the model is capable of updating so quickly. Not only are the physical changes easily fixed, but HVAC or structural analysis being run on the model update immediately as well.