BIM for Owners
Certainly BIM is now in widespread use worldwide, with multiple applications and documented projects. A 2014 study by Dodge Data & Analytics and McGraw-Hill Construction entitled The business value of BIM for owners reports that 65 per cent of private sector owners and 70 per cent of public sector owners in the UK require the use of BIM in new projects. This is in stark contrast to the USA, where BIM is only required by 30 per cent of public sector and 11 per cent of private sector owners. As for the impact of national directives on owners, the study shows that 67 per cent of UK owners accept BIM, compared with only 12 per cent of USA owners.
Moreover, The study stresses that building owners derive the greatest benefit from the BIM process: ‘architectural companies, through BIM simulation, have better communication with the customer’; this helps fulfil clients’ needs.
Furthermore, the study notes that ‘contractors have two important advantages, the spatial coordination of the construction that decreases errors and repetition and the digital construction model that increases speed and quality’. BIM construction helps the owner to receive the building in time and in budget. Diagram 1 illustrates the relationship between traditional CAD design and BIM, and the design time required for a project; it is clear that BIM design requires 50–80 per cent less time to complete.
In 2007, Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facilities Engineering (CIFE) completed a survey of 32 ΒΙΜ projects and identified a number of benefits of BIM:
- 40 % reduction in changes during construction
- accurate cost estimates, up to 3 %
- 80 % reduction in the time taken to estimate construction costs
- 10 % time saving through clash detection
- 7 % reduction in design–construction time
