Let’s be honest, dealing with design ambiguities, endless RFIs, and the constant back-and-forth between site and office can drain time, money, and momentum on any construction project. For engineers, these issues aren’t just technical, they’re real blockers to efficiency, budget control, and client satisfaction. That’s exactly why BIM is no longer optional. It’s a strategic asset. By improving design clarity from day one, cutting down on RFIs, and identifying clashes before they become costly mistakes, BIM has been proven to save teams up to $750K in avoidable construction costs. Even more importantly, it gets projects completed faster, meaning accelerated revenue and fewer sleepless nights over timelines. In this breakdown, we’ll explore how BIM directly boosts ROI and why adopting it early can change everything for your next build.

This will be a full series of articles on the ROI of BIM for construction, which I encourage you to read and follow closely. After finishing this first article, be sure to scroll down and continue with the rest of the five-part series. Let’s get started with Series Three!

Now, let’s emphasise more, because this is where the ROI of BIM truly begins to show.

We’re looking at a schedule impact of three months, and when you break that down into general conditions and time-variable costs across both design and construction, the figure climbs to around $750,000 in savings.

But let’s zoom in on just one area where the benefits of BIM are becoming more obvious, prefabrication.

If you’ve been following trends in the industry, you’ve probably noticed a steady rise in prefabrication. The question is: what role does BIM play in that shift? Does BIM actually make prefabrication more viable? More cost-effective?

The answer is yes, and here’s how we know.

When we take tasks typically done on-site and move them into a controlled shop environment, we’re not just changing the location; we’re transforming the efficiency. One subcontractor reported a 60% cost savings simply by moving work from the field into the shop, where conditions are safer, drier, better equipped, and far more consistent. That’s 60 cents saved on every dollar just by leveraging BIM-driven prefabricatio

We also understand that if you move something into a shop, you need to have a shop. I think we’re in a period of transformation. There may be multiple trades that can share a shop, or it may be a shop that gets specifically rented or constructed. Let’s take a look at what the research is telling us about prefabrication. This is that same project study by Stanford University, the Communal Medical Group, and that team. They saw 20 to 30 percent improvement in labor savings. I don’t think all of this is due to prefabrication, but they are saying it’s this lean BIM way of working.

The MEP subcontractors might, if you add up that portion of the project, that might be 30 to 40 percent of the project. That could be 75 to 100 million of this project, and if you save 20 to 30 percent of the labor on that, that’s a reference point. There’s a story on a slide available online. It’s encouraging them to make it mandatory because they see the impact in this prefabrication space. One local contractor swears this is the biggest number out there in terms of harvesting the benefits of BIM.

BIM and Prefabrication: Driving Labor Savings and Construction Efficiency at Scale

Prefab is the biggest one. You see different people with different emphasis. This Queen Elizabeth study in the UK done by Eric had some great visuals imagining a new way of working. Safe working at chest level instead of over your head on a ladder, injury risk, falls, and fumes. One of the costs we need to consider is shipping, but in this case, prefabrication hit it over six months early. They expected this but it doesn’t have a specific reference point in terms of direct cost savings.

Another one is the MEP trade pricing. This is HVAC giving BIM fabrication software the credit for reducing the cost of the job by eight percent. It would be great if we could get eight percent of the forty percent of the project that comes from MEP trades.

So let’s go over what you calculated on this project. Your opportunity to do prefabrication has increased every year since your two-dimensional days. Absolutely. Prefab is a big target right now. I feel like a lot of the larger subcontractors, especially in the Boston-Cambridge market, are doing it and expanding it.

Growth in Shop Fabrication and Trade Adaptation

They’re increasing the size of their shops. A couple of subcontractors we work with regularly have gone from a 15,000 square foot plant to a 25,000 to 40,000 square foot prefab plant in the last three years. From 15,000 to 40,000 square feet. They’re sold, and we are too. From what we get from them, it’s all the points made before. They’re working indoors, it’s safer, it’s healthier, there’s less waste. They get a full eight hours out of their workers every day instead of less on a job site. It’s more predictable work, and it’s better for everybody.

So if we look at the migration from the two-dimensional environment to an all-in BIM environment, and we see work that was done in the field moved to the shop, what is that amount of work that can be moved to the shop? What is the efficiency expected in this movement? What would be the savings?

Estimating the Labor Shift and Savings from Field to Shop

Of the project cost, MEPs are generally around 40 percent. So 40 percent of 250 is 100 million. That’s MEP, which is primarily where a lot of the prefab is. Not all of it, but most. How much of that is labor? Probably half. Fifty million dollars spent in the old environment on mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection labor. How much of that work can you move into the shop? The number we just saw was around 40 percent of the 50 million. That’s 20 million dollars in labor in the old environment that would be done in the field and is now in the shop.

What would be the savings? What improvement in efficiency would stem from that migration to the shop? Probably 20 to 25 percent of that. So one quarter would be five million. Sounds good. What kind of efficiency would you enjoy? You’re enjoying a 25 percent improvement in labor efficiency. There are savings of five million.

Prefabrication Yields Hidden Gains in Efficiency and Safety Beyond Numbers: Indirect Benefits of Prefabrication

We’ve increased our confidence in the geometry. We’ve gotten it to be more exact. We figured out the clash problems. Now we’re ready to move stuff into the field. Any other benefits of moving this into the shop that are indirect or maybe not included in the calculation? Just health and safety alone. Fewer injuries, more consistent workforce, fewer workers getting injured. There are things like that that come along that don’t get recorded here. Quality. Rework. Waste. Just in terms of the stock the subcontractors need to even begin with. They know they’re going to have less waste if they’re building it in their own shop. So there are definitely some items in here that we’re not capturing that are part of this outside of us, and that’s why I think we are not. We don’t have that much research that tells us actually the world is safer now because more people are working in a controlled environment. But I think intuitively the difference between working on the fifth floor in the driving rainstorm or having to be on a ladder and working up over your head with not the same kind of lighting, not the same kind of ventilation, I think we’re going to be seeing some things that dramatically change things.

I’d like to go to the field now. Let’s just take a look at what happens when we have created an environment where there are fewer change orders coming down the pipe, and we’ve got modern equipment to help us in the field manage this process. This study was done by Atul Kanzod, he’s from DPR but got his masters at Stanford University and SciFi. He did a productivity study looking at what people do every day in the field now. I think for a lot of folks they can’t afford to do this exhaustive research in their own company.

But I think it should make sense if you take a look at the old world and take a look at what this performance metric is telling us. This performance metric on the far right is saying I did not have a lean process and I did not have BIM anything. I studied my superintendent’s time resolving problems, resolving issues in the field between 100 and 200 minutes a day. Even if that’s 120, that’s two hours a day solving problems. If you look at the BIM implementation on the left, the first two columns are both BIM and Lean and BIM and no Lean, but those first two results show numbers that are dramatically reduced. Less than 50, more like 30 minutes a day. So from two hours to 30 minutes, a 75 percent reduction of time resolving problems.

From Field Conflicts to Predictable Productivity

You’re not going to save any money directly because the superintendent is going to be there all day. So no money, but this is a category where I think the world is changing, and I’d like to suggest this is in that same category. If we don’t have problems that slide into the field, then that effort can be repurposed. They can be focusing on quality and schedule, safety, and other things that we want to achieve that makes us world-class. This is a design-build company. They’ve presented at Autodesk University. Their research is indicating that they save 1.7 hours per week per user or three and a half to four and a quarter depending on whether you’re calculating a 40 or 50-hour work week due to field conflict issues.

This is that SciFi study by Atul Kanzod in its original form. Less than two hours a month spent on field coordination issues by the superintendent. So all you did was prevent problems from sliding into the laps of the field people. But we’ve got to figure out what’s the financial impact of this. This study was presented in Istanbul. Turner Construction reported 37 percent less labor in the field, on-site labor, 37 percent less than estimated, and productivity 42 percent higher than average. So here you see what sounds like quite a sophisticated way of looking at performance measurement, not by your average contractor.

I think this shows where contractors are going to have to go in terms of measuring their productivity and taking a look at Lean, and even if it’s not in your trade, even if you’re outsourcing this, this is gold. This information is gold.

Real-Life Impacts of Digital Model Integration on Field Efficiency

A dramatic difference. They returned seven percent of their project budget, returned a savings to the owner. This study was done in the Netherlands. Michael Moran, in his master’s thesis, it’s a good read. The research that he’s done, looking at 15 projects, was funded by Skanska to figure out what happens when you put people with access to digital data via portable handheld computers, handheld devices, tablets, give them access, and change the way that they work. That number comes out sixteen percent.

So what’s that saying is they saved 16 percent of the time. So the question that we have for you, Andy, is if we make this digital model data available, if we reduce problems sliding into the field, if we equip them with modern technology to communicate back, so if they have a question, they get resolved. If they want to take a picture and send it off to get an answer from design or other parts of the team, what would be the efficiency that you might expect on your field team? So the direct number that we’ve seen on the recently completed project was more like 10 percent. So it’s a half a day for a person during the week. Like you said, the superintendent is going to be there all week already. So what does he do with that four hours? It is about safety. It is about keeping the job site organized and neat. It’s also quite honestly about client delight. We’ll go above and beyond what they’re expecting because we can. So we’ve taken care of some of the waste and inefficiency.

By having all our information on mobile devices and having the information that we need, and it’s the right information right there at our fingertips out on the job site. So what do our guys do with the time they’ve got left over? They spend it on making the job better by doing more than what was expected. So 10 percent is your number in terms of the reduction in wasted time, in a way the reduction of reactive activity in the field. Yes, they’re ten percent more efficient. I think so.

We haven’t reduced staff. I think as we see this continuum, we may look at how we organize staffs differently. So depending on the project, we could look at maybe there’s an efficiency on the overall number of people on a job site. But that’ll come in a little bit of time. Right now, we’re just using that time available to really make sure we’re just on top of or ahead of everything. So I have one customer who said, well, I read that thing, and they were working 60-hour work weeks, so they got a 16 percent improvement. So we talked about the philosophy of look, let’s have them go home earlier. Let’s have a better quality of life. And you want to put a number on that? Well, I can’t really. I don’t know if you can.

They just have a better life. That’s a great comment and that’s absolutely true. From our field guys, superintendents, assistant supers, project engineers, I can tell you for a fact. A lot of good friends that are working on the field, and their quality of life is improved by doing this. It’s something that doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet, but I can tell you we’ve got happier guys doing work every day.

How BIM-Driven Prefabrication and Field Integration Boost Construction Efficiency and Safety

Let’s just make sure that everybody in this room and everybody who gets to hear this return on investment may sound like we’re talking about just money, but there are a lot of things I think that are going to improve besides productivity and its financial impact. I’m really hoping that we save some lives and I’m really hoping that we improve lives so I just take a minute to mention so ten percent what does that mean ten percent of the staffing costs are either going to be saved but 10 of your staffing would be how much money you to either give back to them or reallocate right so I think for this I’m not sure that we did we say that we’re actually going to save maybe we’re going to save some money or maybe that time was going to be repurposed. I think there’s some savings there okay maybe if we’re looking at the rate that we were burning through GCs before is it could be 250,000 right in that neighborhood somewhere even if you’re repurposing some of that time some of that time I think there’s still some real dollar savings in there so I think what we’re going to see over the next few years as more and more companies do that to make this transformation is there will be conscious decisions that come from executives. I’ve got a more efficient team I’m going to take more work and try to beat the competitors I’m going to try to improve our employees lives I’m going to repurpose the effort that used to be spent running around resolving problems or running back and forth to the trailer to get answers.

Early Stages of Data Collection in Operations and Maintenance

We’re just going to see some decisions that have to be made by company cultures to figure out what am I going to do with this savings on direction okay operations and maintenance you can see we’ve there’s a bunch of things that we wish we had time to deal with but let’s take the operations and maintenance efficiencies and let’s just acknowledge that I’ve been collecting data performance metrics for seven years and if I have a whole this is it and of course it’s because BIM isn’t that old and we don’t have that many people that have had 10 years of managing building and enjoying savings. If we did even if they had three years I’d be happy but then the question is are they measuring the savings if they are measuring the savings are they publishing that they are saving.

Understanding Big Data Value in Facilities Management

So the same thing happened in construction when we wanted construction data and if you were doing it you might be wanting to keep a secret but this is a place where we are just barely beginning to get data coming in. We have academics talking about it one of the problems we’ve got about the quality of this data coming in is that it gets mixed up so they take the model into their operations and in order to harvest that they take the data out into their facility management database asset management database and the return on investment is from the performance of this big data working in this environment. Now that has two engines it’s the harvesting engine and the source data and you know what is the value of the visualization of this whole thing and what is the cost so there’s one I like the best I’ll tell you what it is when we get there just for what it’s worth this is where the UK government expects the biggest savings so they talk about savings five percent saving five percent during design construction by investing one and getting five net but they’re actually shooting for a 20 savings overall and they believe that the largest price of all the things now of course we talked about the contractor thinking it’s prefabrication.

In the next article, we’ll continue exploring this topic in depth series don’t miss the next article in this series. We’ve only scratched the surface, don’t miss the next part where we dive even deeper into full How BIM Implementation Delivers Long-Term ROI and Cost Savings in Construction Projects (Series 4).

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