How BIM Will Impact Your Future Infrastructure Projects

For nearly 40 years, building information modelling (BIM) has been a mainstay in architecture circles within the industry. But it’s only really gained ground in actual construction over the last two decades. If your company is among these near-future BIM adopters, what impact can you anticipate for your projects?

Financial efficiency with better use of capital project data

Having to rely on traditional construction practices involving 2D drawings and decentralised project details can be very limiting. Think of all the data that starts rolling in from day one. And it continues to accumulate when the completed project has been handed over to the owner’s operations and facility management team. It can be somewhat of a challenge, not to mention overwhelming, to track and understand everything.

Buy that’s where BIM can help. What often makes it stand out is the BIM model’s ability to link directly to all the details associated with each individual element within it, from the smallest nail to the largest volume of concrete. Those include all usable and actionable data, including size, current cost, replacement value, lifespan, warranty information and more. These specific details — or project intelligence — can be leveraged again and again throughout the project’s construction and beyond from within its own common data environment (CDE).

The key is to enter all that data into the BIM model during the estimate phase so it can serve as an interactive reference going forward. That’s when it becomes the foundation construction begins opens up opportunities to experience things you hadn’t been able to with traditional design methods. For instance, designing a structure through BIM modelling frees you up to experiment with variations on materials, exteriors, door and window placement, layout configurations, and more. You’re able to virtually

for data-driven decision making. Based on the model-linked data, the owner, contractors and other stakeholders can evaluate and agree on the most appropriate material and equipment options to invest in for the project based on cost effectiveness, durability and/or repair record, for example.

Optimised design phase efficiency

Building your project through BIM before real walk through a model for a realistic view of the flow, the aesthetics, the space, and even any design mistakes to fix on the spot.

The BIM process also acts like a risk mitigation tool enabling you to discover structural and spatial interferences through automated clash detection. Catching these early enables you to correct them at the design stage — before they’ve had a chance to be built into the structure, which would set the stage for change orders for anything from minor alterations to full-on budget-eating rework down the road. You preserve not only the original cost and schedule estimate, but your profit margin.

Maximising design phase efficiency with BIM means being confident that those choices you make for your future capital projects are cost-efficient with regard to the construction estimate and to future maintenance after handoff.

Interactive data to foster interactive teams

Being able to access and interact with all your projects’ constantly updated details at such a granular level is the kind of transparency that sets the stage for better understanding of the build and more effective communication among project teams, including those disciplines that may not normally have had a seat at the design table.

With all the data linked from the model housed in BIM’s CDE, it serves as a central hub where everyone can interact with the wealth of information it contains. Teams can interact with each other — sharing updated models, asking and answering questions, suggesting modification ideas, reviewing solutions to problems oftentimes before they occur.