If you’re running a construction company, and you haven’t already adopted digital technology into your business, you’re probably thinking about it. After all, digital technologies will help you to increase productivity and reduce the risk of rework for contractors.
In today’s landscape, the industry is facing significant hurdles, including skilled labour shortages, supply chain disruptions, and increasing construction costs. These challenges are making it more and more important for companies to adopt better operational practices to streamline their projects and to solve the problem of connecting teams, data and workflows for better project outcomes.
Get it right, and your company will achieve significant cost savings and productivity gains.
One of the most critical tools for planning, design and construction is Building Information Modelling (BIM). BIM is the holistic process of creating and managing information for a built asset and is the foundation of digital transformation in the architecture, engineering and construction industry. BIM helps companies to realise better ways of working and better outcomes for business and the built world.
Based on an intelligent model and enabled by a cloud platform, BIM integrates structured, multi-disciplinary data to produce a digital representation of an asset across its lifecycle, from planning and design to construction and operations.
But the reality is that it’s not as easy as choosing a digital tool and implementing it. You need the right partner that can help guide and provide training for your team through the process. The first step is to assess your readiness.
Delivering complex construction projects requires a new way of connecting teams, data and workflows.
Integrated digital delivery (IDD) is the use of digital technologies and data to integrate all processes and connect people across the project lifecycle – from design, construction to operations and maintenance. Adopting the strategies and solutions of digital construction best practice will help your firm to increase productivity and reduce cost overruns.
IDD is the backbone connecting BIM with data and digital workflows throughout the project lifecycle, making BIM data accessible to all stakeholders.
When considering the adoption of a technology such as BIM, here’s a few things you might first consider.
Are your RFIs being created and submitted manually through emails, and typed into a spreadsheet? Is your tracking and monitoring also a manual process, with replies and markups on 20 different drawings needing to be extracted into a PDF and re-uploaded? If so, this is the first sign that you’re BIM-ready.
Is your team taking photos on the field, downloading them when they return to the office, then uploading them again so that other stakeholders can visualise in what could only be described as a time-consuming process?
Are you reviewing actual models in BIM design and their respective 2D sheets, on an older computer that can’t effectively open the model?
Are your meeting minutes being manually typed into word or excel spreadsheet documents, without traceability on what issue, RFI, and clashes were discussed as the project commences?
Is your team manually capturing any issues by taking screenshots of clashes and sending them? Your team can’t then visualise the exact location in a 3D model the assigner is trying to show, and resolution tracking is done via email. This is the fifth sign that you’re BIM-ready.
BIM will help your company to manage the build process in a more efficient way, reducing re-work and cost overruns and improving communication across teams.
The best place to start is with a free Digital Construction Readiness Assessment. Developed based on the Singapore Building and Construction Authority’s IDD framework, this short five-minute questionnaire will benchmark your current construction processes in the context of five essential use cases for IDD. Giving you an IDD readiness score, the report will also outline the potential savings that can be unlocked by adopting cloud solutions.
To learn more, take the free Digital Construction Readiness Assessment now.
