BIM increases productivity with consistency

In a recent review of fee income against technical costs, the impact on the business has become clear. Early on, as companies invest in learning the tools, costs and income remained fairly parallel. However, once they became more experienced and made the full commitment to BIM, our costs have flattened out and fee income has continued to rise.

As Quoted by NBS National BIM Survey:“More than 80% agreed BIM increases the coordination of construction documents, with 65% of those using the technology saying BIM delivered cost efficiencies.”

With traditional 2D plans and elevations, quantities such as volumes or areas of materials or numbers of components have to be calculated accumulatively.

With a BIM, quantities can be calculated automatically by the software, making automatic generation of template bills of quantities, door and window schedules an instant operation

The screenshot above shows how simple it is to create a openings BOM in Idea Architecture. It is possible to select the fields required, then at the click of a button the software loops through all of the elements in the BIM identifying the doors and creating the BOM. Schedules could easily be created for other elements, such as walls or floors, showing lengths, areas, or volumes.

Most of the Architecture/Construction Businesses witness that in their current commercial environment the ability to do more for less has been a considerable advantage. Being able to offer additional services outside the traditional scope and confident with consistency in output is generating repeat business, not least because the ability to drive efficiencies from project to project as the database of standard components has become richer. BIM software makes this recipe complete by adding consistency to it.

Building Information Modeling has come a long way in a relatively short time. It is being used by many in the construction industry to make efficiency savings and to improve the accuracy and coordination of documentation. It is common for building information to be held in different models. Relationships must be built between the data to exploit the full benefit of BIM, and open standard formats must be used to translate data from one proprietary format to another.