How Can the Construction Industry Use BIM to Increase Productivity?

Productivity should be the key focus of every company. If you focus on productivity, almost every single benefit that you can get as a company will come your way. You will make more money in less time, you will create more products, or provide more services, in a shorter timeframe, all the while not sacrificing quality. Both your time and the time of your employees will be better spent when you focus on having your company become more productive. And one of the best ways you can achieve this is through BIM.

BIM, or building information modeling, is a 3-D-model-based system that makes planning, designing, and building infrastructure and buildings much easier in the architecture, construction, and engineering industries. Using this type of software makes everything easier, it minimizes the odds of someone making an error and, you guessed it, it makes your business more productive. Further benefits of building information modeling can be found in the article below.

Due to the increased reliability of the works that are at hand, achieved through greater coordination and team management, you will end up with higher quality builds. Through communication and sharing facilitated by this tool, experienced team members can cooperate on a single project, they can work together with the builders much more closely than before. This provides better project control, and greater management, of any and all technical decisions that revolve around the execution of the provided designs and plans.

BIMs make it much easier to estimate costs in the planning stage. Good BIM tools will help you automate menial and mundane tasks revolving around cost quantification and application. They do the boring stuff for you, letting you, or your engineers, focus on more complex factors and activities.

Furthermore, due to the fact that using BIMs can lead to better and easier collaboration, you will waste less time on communicating with other companies. You will also get a better overview of the entire project, giving you a better view of the things that might just be improved and changed to save you money, without sacrificing quality.

An important part of the construction is managing several teams and companies at the same time. You have your architects, your engineers, electrical workers, and standard fair labor men that all have to get their work done on time, safely, and efficiently. Coordinating them all is a nightmare it sucks up your time and energy. BIMs make this much simpler.

Getting a good Autodesk suite, for example, can provide you with the right tools to share your drawings and schematics online, through the cloud. This way multiple engineers can have access to each other’s work in a way that would be impossible through a drawing table. 

Finally, it makes it pretty easy to have stakeholders acquire insight into your projects, building trust and confidence along the way.

Your BIMs can give you a much better visual depiction of the preconstruction process. In fact, you can have a clear view of almost every stage of construction before the first truck reaches the construction site. This level of insight allows you to make changes on the go, to keep things very flexible if you for any reason need to modify your work. An overview like this gives you the possibility of avoiding any costly future changes and modifications.

Safety should be one of the core concerns for any construction company, and keeping a site safe takes time and energy. By making the entire place safe, you can invest that time and energy into getting your company to become more productive.

A good BIM being your back can help make the construction site a much safer, secure location. You can pinpoint hazards and issues before they ever become a problem. By planning the logistical and construction aspects of the build in time, you can have a clear visual representation of the work that is supposed to be done. This provides you with a unique outlook on the entire project, giving you a new perspective on how to keep your people safe.

Furthermore, using these tools means there is a lower chance of you making a mistake. And sometimes, an unfortunate error can lead to a workplace injury. By mitigating the chance of an error occurring, you are indirectly protecting your employees.

You can also see improvements in productivity by having much better scheduling and sequencing. Namely, these programs offer you ways of avoiding and minimizing construction schedule setbacks and delays. By handling multiple projects and activities at the same time, you will be able to control your site better and to organize complex tasks in an easier way. Namely, boosting your company’s efficiency is the best way to get better results and be more productive, and schedule setbacks are the last thing you need if you want to achieve this.

Whether you want to have an easier time estimating costs and, having better clash detection and coordination, or simply make communication within the company (and outside of it) easier, BIMs are a godsend to the construction industry. The reduction of risk, while the increase in prefabrication productivity and speeds, make this an invariable tool. And at the end of the day, it will help keep the workplace safe, while still keeping your build quality good, if not even better, than before.