Da Costa - B2: Chapter BIM for Owners and Facility Managers

This chapter presents many different advantages of using Building Information Modeling software for Owners and Facility Managers. The aim of BIM software besides is used as a tool to design as well as to provide higher quality and better performing buildings it is also utilized to minimize errors that can lead to financial risk. There are some benefits of using BIM for the owners that are discussed in the chapter as following:

-        Increase building performance through BIM-based energy and lighting design and analysis to improve overall building performance

-        Reduce the financial risk associated with the project using the BIM model to obtain earlier and more reliable cost estimates and improved collaboration of the project team

-        Shorten project schedule from approval to completion by using building models to coordinate and prefabricate design with reduced field labor time

-        Obtain reliable and accurate cost estimates through automatic quantity takeoff from the building model, providing feedback earlier in a project when decisions will have the greatest impact 


-        Assure program compliance through ongoing analysis of the building model against owner and local code requirements 


-        Optimize facility management and maintenance by exporting relevant as-built building and equipment information to start the systems that will be used over the lifecycle of the facility 


One of the main benefits of using BIM is to increase building performance as we all have experienced using via BIM programs such as Autodesk Revit, AutoCAD,SAP, and eQuest. These BIM programs can help us to determine the parameter cost of the building, the design of the floor plans, the energy used of the building, and the structural design including its loads. The most useful tool of utilizing BIM for designing the building is to estimate the cost of the building. This will allow the owner to make his or her final decision about the budget for the project. Let’s imagine 100 years ago it would probably extremely difficult to estimate the building cost for the owner and it could take a long time for estimators to estimate the cost of the building.  

When you are designing a building one of the main important requirements is your building design has to meet local code requirements. BIM can allow the owner to design the building that meets the local code requirements and it will help the owner to get your design approved according to the model before the owner constructs the building. This means that BIM also can help to reduce conflicts between the owner and the local.

Another great benefits of using BIM is to allow the owner to keep all the records of the design model in clouds as well as print hard documents for future needs. For example, if there is a failure in structure design after completing the project the owner can use the model to review it with structure engineers in order to find different alternative solution to address the issue. It will be very difficult for the engineers to solve the structural problem of the building if there is no BIM model.

This chapter illustrates figure 4-1 that I found it very interesting to learn as you can see on the figure below:

Feasibility, design, construction, facility startup, operation, facility retrofit have great connection between one another especially in value of facility documentation as its shown in x-axis and the number of years in design, construction and operation in y-axis. The figure shows that collaborative BIM-based delivery process has the highest value of facility documentation comparing to the operations.

There are many more interesting facts that are discussed in the chapter 4 and if you are interested to learn more about potential areas for BIM contributions for Owners and Facility Managers feel free to use the source listed below as your reference.

Source:

C. M. Eastman, “Chapter 4: BIM for Owners and Facility Managers,” in BIM Handbook: A Guide to     Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers, and Contractors, 2nd ed., Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011, pp. 151–191.

Abad,

Thanks for sharing your Co-op experience relating to this topic and it makes your blog much more interesting to read. When I was reading through the chapter four I also found the figure you illustrated in your post interesting to learn the relationship between design/construction BIM applications and post-construction (asset management) BIM application. When you were using a BIM application during your Co-op did you find any difficulties? Or anything that you though can be improved?

Kelly,

I like what you talked about in the last paragraph of your post that one of the major strengths of modeling system is to “intelligent design behavior” of objects. It is very convenient for the designer to design 2D and 3D model using BIM programs since the designer can go back to the model to edit or add more designs anytime and anywhere he or she wants. Anyway, one of the main problems of using BIM is that it is difficult to downgrade the model. For example, if you are using Revit 2013 on your computer at home to design the building and later you open the file with another computer with Revit 2017 to continue to do your work. If you decide to continue to work on your project using the older version of the Revit that you have on your computer, it will not work and you will have to upgrade your Revit model to the similar version or higher version.  

Chris,

I agree with you that the contractors should have access to the BIM since it will help them during scheduling process. It will be very difficult for the contractor to run the project but have no access to the BIM design model because they probably cannot determine how long each project is going to take. For example, if they don’t have access to the structural BIM design model it will be hard for them to determine how many days do they need to complete the structural design model based on the availability of their crews and the equipment in the field.