The BIM approach is proactive, offers some great benefits and produces positive results because all the planning is done before the actual building process starts and in great detail. Problems that would normally surface during the construction stage and cause costly changes and delays will be uncovered and resolved while building the model. Furthermore, the owners have a much better appreciation for how the building will look and what will contain; consequently, there will be fewer changes and fewer disruptions during the construction phase.

In this article, I would like to focus on the impact of BIM on the field people working with the model.

Tradesmen are accustomed to working with paper drawings that have been internally detailed during the pre-construction planning. While paper drawings will continue to be used in the field, a lot of the details will be residing in the model, and it will become necessary to access the information from a computer on an ongoing basis. The foreman will have to become very proficient with the software to access the model and extract the information required to build the project in compliance with the virtual model.

On the positive side, the model will have the information required to build the project readily available, along with the ability to see the virtual model in great details before executing the work. Consequently, the field people will be better equipped to perform productively and experience less confusion and fewer changes.

Once we learn how to work with the digital model, everything should be much easier and faster; however, becoming proficient with the modeling software is going to take some time and some effort.

What products will we need to learn? Are they easy and user friendly? Are our current foremen up to the task? These are the obvious questions that come to mind.

This new approach to building projects requires changes in the current legislation to fully define the responsibilities of the engineer, as compared to the contractor’s responsibilities, and determine who owns the model.

When changes become necessary, it will require a true collaborative and online system that will allow the team to work together to update the virtual model. Ensuring that the model does not change without the contractor knowledge and approval is going to be of paramount importance.

Ideally, we should be working on a live model that contains all approved changes, but then, how do we control the changes?

Changes should be much less frequent because during the virtual model creation time, the owners have had to decide what they wanted and the engineers will have had the time to document it in the model. Another benefit for everyone is that when changes occur, there will be a much greater sense of urgency in getting them approved to avoid confusion in the project.

The digital model brings a new dimension to the project schedule. Not only we will be able to see the timeline, but we will be able to see how the project was supposed to progress as compared to the actual progress. It is mind boggling to just think of how much information can be available at the click of the mouse.

Owners will know how much work was done to date and what percentage of completion has been actually achieved. Scheduling will grow to a greater dimension. The schedule will be able to display the project planned status at any time as well as the actual project status.

As soon as the installed data is inputted, the model will display the project’s latest completion information. Many things will be much easier and the project documentation will be at the highest level with the least amount of effort. As long as we input the daily data, we will be able extract the productivity rate and completion percentage easily and accurately.

It is quite a different process, but one that can make the project a lot more efficient and much more productive, and drive the projects’ completion dates shorter and shorter.

Organizing the project properly will be imperative, more so because the timeline will be gradually shortened and we are going to be expected to work like a clock. Everyone’s expectation from a performance perspective will be heightened and those contractors that cannot work at the faster pace will lose out.

• How do we prepare for this?
• When is it going to truly hit us?
• Are my people up to the task?
• Do I need new blood?
• What kind of new people do I need?

These are all good and very relevant questions that we will gradually answer in future articles. Meanwhile, we are planning and designing the software tools that our clients will need to extract the material quantity from the model as we are currently doing with cadLive from the DWG files (CAD native drawings).

Illustration by Angelo Katsaros