Week 3: BIM for the Construction Industry (Ch. 6)

This week's topic for Group E focused on the advantages of the use of Building Information Modeling in the construction industry and how contractors can benefit from its uses. Chapter 6 of the BIM Handbook supplied us a lot of supporting evidence of the benefits of using BIM for contractors along with some of the challenges that may be faced along the way.

I believe that the Handbook best described the benefits of BIM by saying that “It allows for a smoother and better planned construction process that saves time and money and reduces the potential for errors and conflicts.” Many times contractors are forced to come up with designs for a construction project with very limited information on the building in question because they have to provide these designs in time for the bid meeting. It is not until after winning a construction project that contractors are given much more detailed information to then refine their original designs in order to create building plans (with the traditional design-bid-build approach). These building plans are then limited in what can be done because some of the significant information on the building is not available to the contractor during the design phase. However, with BIM efforts in place early in the design phase of a construction project, contractors and subcontractors are able to coordinate and accurately plan the construction of the building as the project moves along instead of coming across clashes and corrections while in the field and in turn delaying the progress of construction along with increasing the cost of the project as a whole.

Although there are many fields within the construction industry, with the use of BIM prior to construction all of these fields may be tied together in a building information model and the collaboration of all types can be accurately represented in a more organized and timely fashion. BIM application allows contractors to use the model for “estimating, coordination, construction planning, fabrication, procurement, and other functions.” Also, besides having benefits for pre-construction efforts BIM can be used in the field during construction for onsite verification, guidance, and to track the current or previous construction activities as they take place. In conclusion, although the efforts in order to have a construction project effectively use Building Information Modeling and the transition from traditional drawings may be extensive and a bit complicated at first, the benefit of using BIM in construction is immense and I believe BIM will become a very widely used and almost mandatory process in the very near future.


One of my peers Ryan Krall's post on the use of BIM for the Construction Industry (http://ae-510-ay12-13.blogspot.com/2013/01/week-3-ch-6-bim-in-construction.html) made an interesting point in mentioning that "If the model can include every discipline’s drawings within it than there is the potential for not only a zero clash project but also a tool that can be handed over the owner for future maintenance and alterations that they may want to make later on down the road." I thought it was interesting to take into account the uses of BIM in the future of a construction project rather than just during the design and building phases of a project. BIM can be used to keep order to the building's complete life cycle way after construction and far into the future of its maintenance and changes that are made as the building's purpose and uses may change with time to better meet the needs of its users and/or the goals the owner wants to meet with the building.