You’ve probably noticed the shift happening across the industry, more tenders now come with a non-negotiable: BIM. It’s no longer just a tool for early adopters or large firms chasing innovation. It’s quickly becoming the standard, not by choice, but by mandate. For engineers on the ground, this means navigating a new layer of expectations, compliance requirements, and digital workflows. But here’s the thing, these mandates aren’t just red tape. They’re a response to real inefficiencies that have long plagued construction: poor coordination, rework, missed deadlines, and cost overruns. This article unpacks why governments and clients are enforcing BIM adoption and what it means for your day-to-day as an engineer trying to stay competitive, compliant, and ahead of the curve.
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 Five!
Before we dive into this section, a quick note, the next part continues from a panel discussion where Amy shared some key insights.
At this point in the conversation, let shift into the follow-up discussion. The core of the research we’ve been unpacking is all about identifying the financial benefits that BIM brings to a project, and more importantly, understanding who actually experiences those gains. That clarity is exactly what allows us to start thinking strategically about how to apply BIM where it matters most.
and more importantly, to identify who stands to gain the most on any given project. These insights aren’t just numbers on a slide; they’re tools that should guide us in shaping a smarter, more targeted implementation strategy moving forward.
But as Andy is talking about, it’s about people. You have people who have been working the old way for a long time and they’re trying to learn new technology, learn a new tablet, learn how to communicate, create new deliverables, and work in different collaborative settings. So I’d like to introduce the word tension. I think it’s appropriate and I think it’s delicate. What I found is that a lot of my audience four and five years ago was the technical person, and the technical person was asking me to do some research to come up with a return on investment methodology so that they could explain to their executives why they needed to have money in order to invest in BIM. It’s because I can give you a return on that investment, which I’m still doing. I’m also saying it’s not a bad idea to introduce tension in the room with the executive team. When I do it, I’m not suggesting it should sound like this in every room around the country or around the world, but it sounds like this: I think we’re wasting money. I think we’re wasting money on rework. I think we can get the owner to pay for it sometimes, but that’s not an enduring strategy for this company. It’s not what we believe in as the company. I think we are wasting our owner’s money, and if we don’t figure out a way to save that, then somebody else will. We can calculate the money. The research backs up our calculations. Let’s start working in this way and measure our success. Go tell the owner to come on in. We’re going to go over our calculations with you. Maybe we’ll facilitate a workshop with the owner together.
So here’s that little piece of tension. I want to push us to be better, to push us to set the bar, and this is why I like performance measurement. I set the bar in these categories where we have some research that tells us we ought to be able to reduce by 50%, but another guy’s getting 72%. What are we going to do in terms of reduction of RFIs and change orders? Improvement in quality? How can we measure that? So it sets up the next word, which is challenge. Let’s introduce the notion that we are not as good as our marketing says we are. Let’s challenge ourselves to be better. This word connection, I think what you’re seeing on your projects, is a human evolution. I know that what I grew up feeling was designers thought I was greedy and all my people in construction thought designers were dreamers. That was 40 years ago. That’s what it was. We made money on change orders, but that’s because we were suffering. A lot of times you can’t make it all back. Change orders are so disruptive it’s hard to prove how much you actually got damaged. But this word connection is something that I’m encouraging folks to talk about in the follow-up. I’m also saying, if around the world owners are saying you’re going to do BIM for me now, and you have this opportunity to be proactive or reactive.
So this is just a simple little calculation that I did for one customer, which I’ve taken the name out of here. But the difference between implementing aggressively in 2013 versus 2014, the one is more aggressive and just going after these savings and their portion of it. The contractor’s portion of the 17 million that this analysis came up with, I think is under 10%, but the contractor’s portion on a lot of projects is about 16 or 17%. Whatever that proportion is, this was a portfolio study and showed a more aggressive approach actually saving on the projects 3.68 million over a 5-year window. If you are saving that money as a contractor, are you able to pocket it all? You can’t if your competition is right on your tail. So this is just one diagram. It’s worth thinking about. It’s very worthwhile thinking about how much you spent to win work.
Why Trade Contractors Should Be Excited About Measuring BIM Performance and ROI Competitive Construction Strategy
This word, to me, is fundamental there’s a combination of technically strong, socially gifted, and loves construction. He’s having a great time. I’ve been doing this on one side of the fence or another for 30 years, and I’m having the most fun right now. In 1997 we were working together, and Andy’s out there in the field. He’s the architect on the job site collocated with the team. I think you can make it fun, and I think we, as partners, when we develop a partnership, we talk about fun. I think we ought to talk about it more often. There’s no reason why we can’t have little tablet-based games. Here’s a model. I just emailed you a model. One of the classrooms has something on the whiteboard in the model, a message for you. How fast can you find it? If you can’t find it, have your seven-year-old show it to you. I think we can make it fun. I feel like there are people out there that dread this, that fear this, and I think it’s a management issue. I think it is a good time to think about it and make it fun.
On this performance measurement thing, I’m seeing the very elite around the world get excited about performance. They got excited about the potential of BIM, and it maybe came from this kind of gut feel, or they had a geometry challenge like the Denver Art Museum or something like that that kicked them into BIM. Then they saw this opportunity. Then they saw collaborative BIM versus lonely BIM. Now they saw the owner’s opportunity, so they were selling the idea to their customers. Then they said we are performing better than our competition. They’re telling the world that they do BIM, but I think we do BIM better. So let’s measure our performance compared with the research. We see this setting of performance targets. By the way, every executive I see around the world now, I say the same thing. Don’t create a BIM initiative. Create a performance initiative and use BIM just the way a pole vaulter uses a pole to get over the bar. The bar is set, and they use the pole to get over the bar. It’s about getting over the bar.
So we see some customers really excited about this. This is down the road, but I think you can start as soon as you get your forward-looking calculations of the potential savings. The next question everybody’s going to ask 24 months from now is: did we save the money, yes or no? This performance measurement is showing sophistication. I know Kiewit has it. I’m going to show you just an example. This is now publicly available. It’s a company that invested in BIM, is good at BIM, said our performance has improved, let’s measure it, and now they’ve decided to publish it.
Excuse me. So this is Mortenson. I’m sorry. You can get your own copy. There’s a short version and a long version. I’ll just show you some of the highlights of this. Thirty-two days of average schedule reduction due to VDC, virtual design and construction. Twenty-five percent and more productivity increase. You can see how these results are exciting for a certain crowd. The green is exciting for the owner because that’s money that they’re going to get in terms of revenue, especially if the subcontractors can predict this productivity increase. The owners may be excited about that. The general contractor may be excited about that. But you have to be excited if you’re a trade contractor. Now Morson does a lot of self-perform work, so when their productivity goes up in concrete formwork, they pocket a lot of money or they turn it into competitive advantage. And 2.95 average direct cost reduction. So this does not include the indirect cost but a 3% almost 3% average savings. That would be 7.5 million on your $250 million project. These are 18 case studies. You can read about them, each individual project and the story behind each one and how they came up with these. But it shows to me a quite impressive sophistication.
Rethinking BIM Initiatives Through Executive Coaching
So when I say coaching for executives, for me it’s really simple. Don’t create a BIM initiative. It’s too easy for me to push back. Oh we never had BIM in the old days and we used to make a fine profit. Well okay it’s not the old days. And I’m not asking you to use BIM. If you can find another way to get this performance, if you can save 17 million on 250 million, I don’t care if you use a broom. But crafting this worthwhile initiative is what I showed you earlier on this list of defining the current state. So the relationship that I would like to have with my customers, and I encourage our partners to have locally with the local customers, is create that fabric of the relationship that allows you to go through the calculations.
So do the background as much as you can, understanding your current environment. Maybe there’s some academic research. One of the things you can do is get your hands on a couple of these research papers and just let folks read them. Get them started. Maybe there’s a free viewer and you can pick a model off the web somewhere and have them fly around the model and just begin to have an understanding what BIM is and what are the results that are coming in around the world. And what does that mean to us.
It goes and this is where about 60 or 70% of my customers will really be honest with me. They’ll say look we lost our shirts on a couple of projects and it was all because of or we. Some owners really open up to me. Some contractors really open up to me with their own case studies. When we go through the opportunities in the middle I don’t talk about products. If you look at that list, this is about performance indicators. What I’m trying to do around the world is to find people out there that have the same interest as I do. I would just like to be world class at measuring performance of project teams and I’d like to really be good at leading indicators which predict performance.
Measuring Performance and Predicting Outcomes in Construction Projects
Now executives will be really glad to work with me if I can help them predict whether they may have a problem in the future. That leading indicator so that there can be intervention to keep that performance up. On the right I’ve got just a list of things that I think belong in the initiative as we go forward. It includes that personal touch. But I do find executives at the highest level, it’s much easier for them to imagine themselves saying we’re going to try to improve performance and we’re going to measure it, than it is we’re going to do a BIM implementation across the company and everybody’s going to learn how to run this stuff. Well a lot of folks don’t have to know how to run it. They need to know how to manage this new process.
Going to comment on that. This was completely unrehearsed. What you just said is exactly what we’ve been doing at cons construction. So for the last six or seven years we’ve been really fortunate to be very successful. We’ve been on a great uphill curve in terms of growth and overall revenue and everything else. It honestly all started when we really got honest with ourselves and decided to start measuring everything that we could. That wasn’t a BIM initiative. It was just let’s measure everything we can and track what we’re doing. It’s something that everybody knows about when people come in on the first day. That’s what they hear. It’s just part of our culture at this point, trying to measure everything.
It’s not always easy. Sometimes it’s hard and sometimes you have to step back and be honest with yourself again. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our success has been at exactly the same time that we decided to really measure our performance wherever we are. What I like about the sound of that is when you improve you know it and you can celebrate, just like making your schedule milestones on a project. You make a milestone, you celebrate, then you go back to work. That’s very interesting. That’s a mark for me of the most sophisticated contractors. They’re not talking so much about technology, they’re talking about performance. Once they’re talking about performance, they sooner or later say let’s measure this.
So the word that I wanted to come up with as I heard you talking is you’re beginning to harvest intelligence from the data that you have. You’re measuring. This data has been sitting around forever. It’s in one form or another in one file in one server. So you are becoming sophisticated at harvesting this big data. I think we are at the place where I say I don’t say thank you yet. I think we open it up for questions. I hope this has been instructive so far. What you’ve seen is a structured approach to evaluating the financial benefit of an initiative. We call it BIM in the title, but the implementation may not have that much BIM in the announcement or in its name. But it really comes down to trying to harvest every penny in every phase for every stakeholder and then calculate what’s your piece and what are you willing to invest to get good at harvesting that piece.
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