Week 4 - BIM will Improve vs Not Improve Buildings

The topic I chose to analyze is the impact BIM actually has on buildings, whether it improves them or not.

To better see how BIM influences buildings, we have to go back to a discussion we had in an earlier week of class and revisit the needs of a building as well as its life cycle. As Andrew Palladino points out in his post, the building owner can now have a tangible idea of how much his building will cost to build and maintain with BIM, as opposed to only knowing the initial costs. A building needs to have adequate architectural, structural, HVAC, electrical, lighting, plumbing and fire systems for the basic needs. BIM software, like CAD programs, can model and show all these systems and even their relationships with each other. A change in the structure and area of a building may have a serious impact on the duct sizing and other associated costs of construction and maintenance. By monitoring the changes done in any system, BIM can track the changes of other systems and present important information to the architects and engineers. The cost of building and maintaining the building can be identified in the BIM software by the use of materials and measuring energy use. An intelligent building, then, would benefit from the use of BIM software.

A Study Conducted by the University of Florida in 2007 identified the impact BIM had on the six highest construction key performance indicators (KPI’s) commonly used in the construction industry as accepted metrics for assessing job performance. The study showed that BIM positively influenced, from highest to lowest, Quality Control/Rework (94%), On-time Completion (88%), Units/Man hour (86%), Dollars/Unit (80%), Cost-Overall (80%), and Safety (54%). This study shows that BIM has a positive impact on the construction of buildings, specifically on the quality and on-time completion of the project which saves the owner money. (Suermann)

Figure: Overall Favorable Responses when ranking KPIs with respect to impact on BIM

A second study provides some perceived negative effects of BIM on the building process. They point out that the BIM software can track the numerous changes done on the project, no matter how minimal each one is. The author questions the abilities of the engineers to identify all the changes that the program itself can make to the model and if they would be willing to sign and seal the drawings not knowing what changes may have taken place from their original intent or design. My suggestion would be to limit the amount of people who can actually make changes to the BIM (so only a select few architects and engineers) can alleviate this perceived threat. (Kuehmeier)

References:

Suermann, Patrick C. "EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF BUILDING INFORMATION MODELING (BIM) ON CONSTRUCTION ."http://www.engr.psu.edu/. International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality, 27 OCTOBER 2007. Web. 28 Jan 2014. <http://www.engr.psu.edu/convr/proceedings/papers/22_Suermann_submission_47.pdf>.

KUEHMEIER, JOSEPH. "BUILDING INFORMATION MODELING AND ITS IMPACT ON DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION FIRMS."http://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/. UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, n.d. Web. 28 Jan 2014. <http://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/E0/02/22/11/00001/kuehmeier_j.pdf>.

Comments on other posts:

To Teddy Bruder: Great post! The graph is a good illustration of the costs of a project along it's life cycle. The cost of the Drafting Centric Workflow (#3) rises to a similar cost point in the Construction doc phase as the BIM Workflow (#4) does in Detailed Design, but since the cost of design changes gets more expensive as the project moves forward (#2) does the graph take that increased cost in consideration when plotting the #3 line?

To Dongyan Qi: Would you happen to know the difference of cost of teaching a contractor to use BIM as opposed to current methods of analyzing drawings? I also think the advantages of using BIM are greater than any disadvantage, you also have to consider that certain BIM software may have higher learning curves.