Bracing for BIM

With Building Information Modelling (BIM) currently innovating process industry-wide, some have expressed concerned at the notion that it may make hitherto essential job roles obsolete.

Kim van Rooyen – Director of Turner & Townsend

Kim van Rooyen – Director of Turner & Townsend – speaks to UK Construction Media about BIM, its impact on the Cost Manager and Quantity Surveyor, and the industries adoption as a whole.

Broadly speaking, how is BIM implementation impacting the role of cost management professionals and quantity surveyors?

If the cost manager (CM) or quantity surveyor (QS) embraces BIM it has the potential to make their lives a lot easier. What do I mean by that? BIM is able to deliver much more information, provided it is set up correctly and contributed to. It might actually give you the edge over your competitors, as it can be used to automate some of the more mundane tasks. While a traditional CM or QS would use measurement tools to build up bigger quantities – a very labor intensive process – BIM allows for the automation of those laborious parts and enables CMs and QSs to concentrate on the bits that add value to the role.

BIM provides more opportunity and, ultimately, the traditional process may well die out. The role itself will never change however – it just becomes a new way of doing things.

I liken it to mobile phone technology. Older phones have functionality even today, but for those who have embraced mobile phone technology – for use in BIM for example – it has revolutionised their lives and made them more effective.

There’s obviously some negativity regarding BIM implementation in the Cost mManager and Quantity Surveyor fields. Where does this stem from?

There’s an unfortunate perception of BIM being an ‘architects friend’. A lot of folks haven’t got their heads around how BIM can be used to support scheduling, costs and, most significantly, the operational side of things.

BIM requires careful planning from the very beginning. If it’s not carefully planned it can be extremely difficult and costly to get right. In my experience businesses don’t think about BIM soon enough – it comes as a bit of an afterthought and there ends up being a lot of negativity around it. If you have a clear BIM strategy from the very beginning however – and an understanding of your CMs and QSs roles within that strategy – you are contributing towards success.

Change management is crucial to this process as well – changing the mind-set around data and information being valuable. I’ve seen some recent examples of people producing data for cost or quant purposes, discarding it and measuring up elsewhere. BIM gives people the opportunity to enter that data once, use it many times and build on it over time.

What are the positives of BIM implementation from a Cost Management and Quantity Surveying perspective?

It’s about speed and accuracy – it will certainly speed up the design process. From a cost management perspective, you will have greater accuracy around developing client requirements, a more robust cost plan, and added rigor around the change control process. As such, it’s going to make cost managers lives a lot easier.

I also think that it’s a positive step towards collaboration between different parts of team, the client and so on. Ultimately, if I were a cost manager I would want to strive for a level of cost certainty that’s far more accurate than anything I’ve previously been able to achieve.

How is Turner & Townsend helping its workforce to acclimatise to a world with BIM?

As with everything, it’s about education, education, education. We have three main areas when upskilling our teams. Firstly, as part of embedding digital within our process, we are helping our teams to understand the benefit of BIM and providing them with the necessary support as part of a change management process.

Secondly, we have created a Centre of Excellence. Our teams are driving research and innovation, looking at bigger and better ways of delivery, and providing a resource base for knowledge and guidance.

Thirdly, we’re getting out into the field and upskilling our teams through workshops. One thing that I’ve learnt is, once somebody has confidence in using BIM they never go back.

Would you have any advice for companies looking to implement BIM into their business?

A couple of things come to mind. The first concerns leadership from the top down. BIM is a methodology, it’s not a shiny object that can be bought, and so businesses must be serious about the change management aspect and build it into their way of doing things.

Secondly, something that has proved successful for us is fostering the idea of research innovation and knowledge sharing. It’s collaborative and people need to feel that they are part of that journey.

It goes without saying, but having the right support mechanism in place is important. The roles that we provide internally to support our teams are around assurance. It’s about building up capability to the level that clients expect.

Obviously, businesses must also think about the hardware. If you’re running fully integrated CM and QS BIM then you will need to have good technology – network infrastructure, systems and tools – in place and available to the relevant teams.

With the Government’s Level 2 BIM mandate looming, how do you feel the construction industry is doing in terms of its BIM adoption?

I think the industry as a whole is getting there, though they’re a long way off the mark. There’s a lot of talk about Building Information Modelling but I think businesses are trying to run two processes in parallel because they don’t yet trust BIM, and that’s providing an overhead.

It’s like any new innovation – it will eventually become the norm. I see more traction, certainly within the public sector, and yes, it helps that it has been mandated, but I’ve not seen much progress in the private sector. People don’t see the benefit because they have yet to get the minds around data and data ownership.

But how do I see the market as a whole? Definitely better than it was!

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