Too many firms still think of BIM as a mere modelling tool but in fact it is capable of far, far more, argues Digital Design Manager at chapmanbdsp Miklos Magyar.
From its first appearance in built environment parlance in the early 1990s to its widespread adoption in the 2000s and the government’s push towards its usage in the public sector in the 2010s, BIM has been around for decades now.
While for many firms across the construction and engineering sectors, BIM came onto the scene via software procurement route, today it can and should mean more than keeping an up-to-date Revit licence and employing a handful of trained modellers. There’s a real opportunity to use it across the wider business. Properly understood and deployed, it move beyond a drafting tool and into the realm of a data and decision-making platform. Firms that treat it purely as a modelling exercise are leaving a lot of value on the table.
The business case for BIM can most clearly be seen in two key areas: risk and speed. The logic on risk is pretty simple. In traditional workflows, construction issues tend to show up on site – which is just about the worst place to find them. By that point, you’re already looking at delays, rework, possible contractual disputes, and the kind of reputational damage that’s hard to shake. BIM shifts that risk to the left. By recreating the building virtually before a single piece of steel is lifted, design teams can catch and resolve those issues early, when changes are still relatively painless and inexpensive.
And when it comes to speed, the gains come through better collaboration. Fewer handoffs between parties mean faster project turnaround, and contractors get a richer, more reliable foundation from which to kick off procurement and planning. BIM has the potential to put collaboration front and centre in the built environment. Few can argue there can still be an element of silo working when it comes to the stakeholders involved in the construction programme. And so one of the most valuable things an experienced digital design manager can do is bring the different disciplines together through their usage of BIM.
The common data environment tools available today, like ACC and Revizto, make that coordination traceable and accountable in a way that simply wasn’t possible before. Every open question has an owner, a due date, and a clear resolution trail. Perhaps most importantly, when a design team sits in a room together with the model up on screen, everyone is looking at the same thing. There’s one single source of truth, and it belongs to everyone. There’s none of the misinterpretation that congested two-dimensional drawings of old have perhaps created.
The ability to isolate systems, colour-code them, and present purpose-built visuals, whether to a fellow engineer or a client with no technical background, translates engineering complexity into something far easier to understand.
There’s another side to BIM’s strategic value that doesn’t always get the spotlight it deserves: the way it helps organisations build and hold onto institutional knowledge. Every project is a learning opportunity – workflows get sharper, lessons get captured, and that hard-won experience can be shared consistently across teams rather than siloed with individuals. Over time, BIM becomes something of a living record of how your business thinks and works, so that each new project starts from a stronger foundation than the last.
And that can of course help to level out the variations in experience levels and familiarity with technology that exist in most workplaces, including architecture, engineering and construction firms. If everyone’s using BIM, that gives the opportunity for senior team members to pass on experience and junior staff to help familiarise their colleagues with newer ways of working. Each generation fills the other’s gap if you will.
Despite all of this, BIM has not yet delivered its full promise, certainly in the UK. The fundamental problem is that BIM is sometimes layered on top of existing processes instead of replacing them. In practice, Revit and other similar software available, is most commonly used for modelling and drafting with the two-dimensional drawing remaining the main output for many teams.
And then there’s the issue of the variations in, for example, naming conventions, and workflows, which can vary considerably from one organisation and one discipline to the next. Since automation depends on a degree of consistency, this represents an ongoing challenge. That said, the pace of change reflects the complexity of what’s being asked of the industry.
The direction of travel, however, is clear. BIM is no longer a three-dimensional modelling exercise. The 4D dimension connects the model to scheduling; 5D to cost planning, where quantities of length, area, and volume drawn directly from modelled objects can generate a cost plan automatically. The 6D layer adds sustainability data, with embodied carbon values attached to individual elements so that the full carbon footprint of a building can be calculated as a direct output of the model.
The 7D dimension, meanwhile, extends into facilities management, enabling predictive maintenance by tracking warranty periods and expected lifespans of individual components, and allowing energy simulations to be run in the model before any operational decisions are made on site. And AI is beginning to take on the most repetitive modelling tasks, annotation and tagging too. What’s clear is that firms that are building their business strategies around BIM now, treating it as a data platform rather than a drawing production tool, will be much better placed in a competitive marketplace.