Friday, February 4, 2011

The essential problem with BIM: It is a product that, nobody that is aimed at, really wants to buy!


I am stirring up trouble (again), really, this BIM has been around for quite some time and the various groups of direct/or indirect purchasers targeted for services/products that fall under BIM are anything but queuing up to have them;

Why is that?
Trawl through the web for ‘benefits of BIM modelling’ and you’ll find truckloads of potential gains that various parties will enjoy if they went down the BIM route and forked out additional funds to support this new ‘thing’.
True, no one claims that BIM costs extra in the long run – just right now – so the financial model should really be easy to sell.
It is not, (easy to sell) and one reason for this is that it is actually quite tricky to request a party to pay extra for something that they already have been paying for and supposedly been receiving.

The Building Owner should fund the BIM for the project, but how can you substantiate the request for extra costs that will bring benefits that should’ve always been provided anyway.
How to do that, without owning up that till now:
You employed 2D, drawing based FlatCAD, wasting client’s money and knew that the unmanageable number of drawings brought unnecessary risks to the project.




1 comment:

  1. You are exactly right. BIM is a really tough sell right now because (rightly so) clients expect 100% complete and coordinated construction documents from their architects. And yet, contractors are passing on costs during construction for coordination! Even BIM-savy architects are the first to admit that their models are for design only and are not construction quality. As an old-school architect (read Master builder) I find this unacceptable and perhaps the leading cause of the diminishing role of architects in the industry. Keep writing! Good stuff!

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