SPECIAL REPORT: Are You Ready For BIM?

 
The $611-million Nationals Park, in Washington, D.C., was constructed in just under two years—faster than any other professional sports stadium in the United States—thanks to the use of building information modeling.  
Wayne Stocks, Thornton Tomasetti, Inc., all photographs

Computer-based technological advances, particularly in modeling and information management, continue to push the limits of design and construction coordination. But is building information modeling (BIM) ready to become standard protocol? The answer appears to be yes.
By Brian Fortner

n March 30, the Washington Nationals opened the 2008 Major League Baseball season in the United States in a new stadium. (The Boston Red Sox had played the Oakland Athletics a few days earlier, but that game was in Tokyo.) The structure was christened by President George W. Bush, who threw out the ceremonial first pitch less than 24 months after the first crews arrived to build it. The resulting $611-million Nationals Park, in Washington, D.C., officially became the fastest U.S. professional sports stadium ever to be constructed.

The design and construction team for the Nationals Park project faced an immovable completion date—the opening day of the professional baseball season. Because of funding delays, the project was not approved until the spring of 2006, leaving just two years for completion. The Washington, D.C., office of Thornton Tomasetti, Inc., entered into a joint venture with ReStl Designers, Inc., of Washington, D.C., to carry out the structural engineering for the project, and Wayne Stocks, a principal of Thornton Tomasetti, says that the job simply could not have been done within that time frame without the use of what is called building information modeling (BIM). This process creates an advanced computer representation of a structure that is also linked to a database that can provide information about every aspect of the design.

Because the engineering and construction teams developed the three-dimensional model of the structure before breaking ground, only 100 requests for information—as opposed to the typical 1,000 to 10,000—were received during construction of the 41,000-seat stadium.

Nationals Park and other high-profile projects are forcing the design and construction industry to approach project delivery in new ways. Shorter schedules, budgets set in stone, and complex designs leave little room for error or delay. As more projects move to fixed-cost contracts and more owners challenge the cost overruns and delays that often plague larger projects, better methods of delivering projects are being developed. And BIM is increasingly becoming the tool of choice for owners, architects, engineers, constructors, and subcontractors as a way not only of managing and streamlining the many steps in the design and construction process but also of helping owners operate and maintain the structure long after the designers have completed their work.

The use of the BIM process results in a digital representation of a building or project that incorporates three-dimensional (3-D) modeling of the structure’s components. The model is linked parametrically to virtually all aspects of a project, including the structural design and analysis; scheduling; and material, labor, and operational cost data. Sophisticated versions of BIM make it possible to virtually construct an entire project in digital format before breaking ground at the jobsite. The model is used to coordinate the design and to transfer construction documents during the design and construction phases. Ultimately it is transferred to the owner for use in operating and maintaining the building.

Chuck Eastman, a professor of architecture and computing and the director of the AEC Integration Laboratory (the acronym denoting “architecture, engineering, and construction”) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been writing and lecturing about virtual design and construction for more than 30 years. He describes BIM as “digitally modeling the building for design and construction practices so that the model and its properties and attributes are the information of record for that project.” The important distinction in Eastman’s definition is “information of record.” Some designers claim to have used BIM for their projects when in reality they have simply used 3-D modeling as a visualization tool, omitting the transfer of information that would have made the method a true BIM process.

Engineers have been conducting 3-D analyses for years, so the jump to 3-D modeling is often not difficult, according to Erleen Hatfield, P.E., a principal of Thornton Tomasetti in New York City and the person responsible for the firm’s integrated modeling services, its name for BIM. “When we went from 2-D drawings to AutoCAD twenty years ago, we basically took the exact same process and just did it on the computer,” she says. “But now with BIM we are actually changing the process. We are changing the way we can deliver the job. We are really shaking things up with BIM.”

Among the advantages of BIM is the paperless electronic transfer of information, which saves time and effort but also requires design firms and anyone else involved in the construction of the project to be astute in managing information technology. The concept is to enter data once and use them many times; BIM has the power to link huge numbers of data by coordinating all of the elements of design and construction. More owners are requiring BIM as they come to understand the benefits conferred by a well-coordinated, digitally based project delivery system.

“BIM is information,” says Andrew W. Gayer, P.E., S.E., M.ASCE, a vice president and structural engineering principal of hok in St. Louis. “BIM means I can give someone quantities. BIM means I can store a fire rating tagged to a beam and someone can pull that out and know how much fireproofing to spray on. BIM means more than just having a 3-D view. In the global picture, BIM really means information.”

One question that the engineering, architecture, and construction professions are struggling to answer right now is how much information must be included in a model before a project can legitimately claim to be using BIM—and to realize all of its benefits. At the moment, the distinction between what BIM is and is not depends on whom you ask. In its simplest form BIM can involve linking a structural model to, for example, the member dimensions, which can then be used to generate shop drawings and contract documents. To some, this type of modeling might be considered 4-D modeling with only a limited use of BIM. At its most sophisticated level, BIM combines all the documents, data, and software packages used during design, construction, and, ultimately, operation and management into a single electronic source.

One of the best discussions of the differences between 4-D modeling and BIM can be found in a paper published in 2004 by Stanford University’s Center for Integrated Facility Engineering (CIFE) entitled “The Scope and Role of Information Technology in Design and Construction,” by Martin Fischer and John Kunz. The authors define 4-D models as models that involve more stakeholders early in a project who inject their business and engineering knowledge into the design of the facility, its schedule, and its organization. The models help improve the coordination between professions in all phases of the building’s life cycle and can be created quickly with commercially available software. The 4-D models link all of the components of the project’s 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) models with design, procurement, and construction schedules so as to make it possible for team members to view the planned construction of a facility over time on a computer screen. Typically, the funding for such models can come from the overall project budget.

Building information models, on the other hand, “support the exchange of data between software tools to speed up analysis cycle times and reduce data input and transfer errors,” according to Fischer and Kunz. “Their set-up, testing, and use cannot typically be financed on a project basis, but rather require corporate funding. . . . When successfully deployed, the ability to reuse project data to do more work with the same budget or the same work with far less budget should provide a competitive advantage that is more sustainable than that gained from visual models.”

But to create such a model, myriad details must be established by inherently different interests, including architects, engineers, contractors, subcontractors, fabricators, detailers, suppliers, and others. This is no small task considering the traditional design and construction process, where it can take weeks to have a single issue resolved by, say, the architect and the engineer or by the engineer and a contractor. Under a traditional design/bid/build contract, designs are moved sequentially from architect to engineer to contractor to fabricator, with little interaction until the project breaks ground and problems start to arise. Then the dreaded requests for information (RFIS) start to pile up, which creates a double-edged sword for the engineering firm. First, RFIS slow the process; for example, contractors must wait while senior-level engineers redesign a problem area. In some cases, a project can reach a standstill while RFIS are negotiated, answered, and sent back to the jobsite, which can take weeks.

The second problem that affects engineering firms in particular directly involves the bottom line. Once a design is handed over to a contractor in a design/bid/build job, the engineers start to move on to other work in their firms. When RFIS start to show up, those engineers must be pulled from those projects to address the problem on the previous job. The schedule for the new job could start to slip as a result. For this reason, reducing RFIS has always been a goal in the design and construction fields, and BIM is having a dramatic effect in this regard.

The Nationals Park project, for example, saw fewer than 100 RFIS on the structural steel portion of the job, according to Mark Tamaro, P.E., M.ASCE, a vice president of Thornton Tomasetti and the company’s project manager for Nationals Park. “On a job this size we could have had anywhere from one thousand to ten thousand RFIS [while] trying to sort out all the steel details,” Tamaro says. The BIM process made it possible for all team members to be involved in the initial modeling effort, thus avoiding clashes down the road.

“You have to be collaborative and listen to the subs that are ultimately going to inherit your models,” Tamaro says. “If people are going to use this model for different purposes and different trades and disciplines, you have to be able to accommodate different demands and different approaches to building [your model].”

This coordinated approach to model building could be the most pronounced change that BIM has made in the way that engineering firms approach a project, and it dovetails well with the move toward the design/build and design/build/operate contracting methods, which also demand close coordination up front. However, these developments present challenges in that they blur the boundaries between the work of the architect, the engineer, and the contractor, according to Eastman, who is the principal author of BIM Handbook: A Guide to Building Information Modeling for Owners, Managers, Designers, Engineers and Contractors (New York City: McGraw-Hill, 2008). Eastman says that this development is not a bad thing: “The civil and structural engineering people now have an opportunity to have a stronger and tighter role in the design process.”

In fact, BIM changes the way that engineering firms communicate and collaborate with owners and other partners on a project. The model creation process demands that much of the engineering detail be designed early in the schedule, so engineers need to better understand the needs of architects and contractors—and vice versa—as early in the process as possible.

While this may require some extra work at the beginning, when implemented correctly BIM has the potential to resolve discrepancies between the different disciplines during the project planning phase rather than in the field. It also ensures that plans and design documents remain consistent as the documents are passed to each discipline. Furthermore, it helps all parties involved to better visualize a project and recognize potential problem areas earlier because designs can begin in a 3-D model, effectively bypassing the 2-D CAD drawings, which those who are not engineers often have difficulty comprehending.

Anyone with access to the model constructed through building information modeling (BIM) can highlight individual elements of the structural support system, red, to access information pertinent to that member. In this case, users could see the number of bolts used and find out whether or not the element required painting and whether it had been shipped by the supplier. The completed upper deck and canopy, below, precisely match the BIM model.

“Construction documents and shop-level documents are arcane, complicated diagramming methods, and they were way past their usable end,” says Kunz, CIFE’s executive director. “I now see models in BIM of ductwork layout going through trusses so that people can understand and deal with issues up front that they couldn’t have done earlier.”

As outlined in the report Collaboration, Integrated Information, and the Project Lifecycle in Building Design, Construction, and Operation, published in 2004 by the Construction Users Roundtable, a construction trade association based in Cincinnati, early project coordination using BIM tools leads to a better understanding of the project scope, better decisions in the areas of scheduling and material selection, and, ultimately, cost savings because potential expensive mistakes can be spotted earlier in the process. “Owners driving full collaboration through information sharing early in the project process are most likely to achieve the desired outcomes: fast, efficient, effective, and cost-bound buildings,” the report notes.

Because BIM is still in its infancy, it has been used to manage entire projects only sparingly, mostly on very large and complex projects. But many design firms are beginning to change their standard practices by incorporating some aspects of BIM, particularly modeling, into at least some aspect of each of their projects. Nationals Park, for example, used BIM primarily for steel erection.

The compressed construction schedule required steel orders to be fast-tracked. The design/build contract for the project had already created the need for close coordination on the part of the different disciplines, and BIM accelerated the process. “We had direct access to the steel subcontractor,” says Tamaro. “We had the ability to electronically transfer the design information to the steel subcontractor, as opposed to putting it out on paper.” This process saved a significant amount of time, he says.

The structural steel design for Nationals Park was divided into 10 sections, and construction proceeded around the bowl of the stadium as the structural designs were completed. The steel was fabricated and delivered to the site in the same number of packages. As a model of each section was created it was sent directly to the steel fabricator, sparing that company the task of creating its own models from paper drawings. “We couldn’t produce it on paper as fast as we could produce it in the model,” Tamaro adds. “If we gave them a stack of a hundred sheets of drawings, the fabricator would spend a month creating a model just to produce a bill order.”

BIM also helped tremendously during construction coordination. Instead of constructing all of the foundations at once, then carrying out all the cast-in-place concrete work, and then beginning the massive steel delivery and erection phase, the project team built the stadium from one end to the other in a circular fashion. “With all the players at the table, we were able to find the sweet spot [where we could] get enough concrete foundations and cast-in-place concrete going and then follow up with the steelwork,” says Thornton Tomasetti’s Stocks. Steel would be topped out on one section as foundations were being placed a few sections ahead, creating a layering effect for the different disciplines. The technique saved at least six months compared with a more traditional construction sequence, Stocks says.

Coordination of the model during the BIM process proved to be of paramount importance in construction sequencing and in reducing problems in the field. During the creation of the BIM model, the design/build team, which was led by a joint venture known as Clark/Hunt/Smoot—comprising Clark Construction Group, LLC, of Bethesda, Maryland, Hunt Construction Group, of Indianapolis, and Smoot Construction, of Washington, D.C.—held regular meetings to discuss the concrete and steel models. This enabled the architect to review the aesthetic aspects, the precast supplier in charge of the seating to verify the connections, and the erector to determine if the steel pieces were shippable, all at the same time. The general contractor could basically coordinate the entire operation in one room by looking at the model, Stocks says. “You could look at a three-dimensional image and everyone could conceptualize what was going to happen, and everyone’s needs were put out on the table,” he says.

Tamaro puts it this way: “The beauty of the BIM was that it allowed us to go from analysis directly into a model faster than we can go from analysis to paper. And paper still wouldn’t convey the whole story.” Because the project was divided into sections, the models were consistently improved as one section was completed. Such problems as clash detection became less of a concern as the final sections of the BIM model for steel erection were completed.

Although 8,000 tons (7,258 metric tons) of steel were used, by the end of the job the number of steel members that had to be reordered or changed was less than 2 percent, according to Tamaro. “We thought ten percent of steel members might change,” he says. “We were shocked at how little had to be refabricated or altered.” The contractor was also able to track a stockpile of material held in what the team referred to as the boneyard. Discarded steel was documented within the model and could be located and reused when necessary, eliminating the need to order new sections from the fabricator.

In addition to its benefits in coordination, the BIM process helped the project team track the schedule. “There were days when steel was starting to go up and you would talk to the contractor and ask him how it was going,” Stocks say. “He would say, ‘Well, we are two days behind schedule right now.’ You usually talk about a project like this in terms of give or take a month and you are doing pretty well.” In the end, steel erection for the 41,000-seat stadium took less than a year.

Although owners are often the ones who request the use of BIM, more design and engineering firms are starting to require it on their projects even if owners do not. This derives partly from the fact that firms that have used BIM in the past because of the complexity of a project or because an owner insisted on it have been impressed with its benefits. An annual survey conducted by CIFE reveals that more firms are using BIM each year and those that have used it plan to incorporate it into future projects. “The astonishing thing was that everybody who started to use BIM in [2006] wanted and planned more in [2007],” says Kunz. “Normally when there is any new initiative, people start to use it and then they see the problems with it and then they back off.”

Design firms with vision are alive to the benefits of BIM as the technologies improve. But many firms are wary of investing time, effort, and capital and then seeing BIM go by the wayside. The switch to BIM requires changing the culture of a design firm. “It is not simply learning about new software,” says Ken Sponaugle, the director of architecture and engineering design in the Cincinnati office of Burgess & Niple. “It’s a different process.”

The emergence of virtual design and construction, including BIM, appears to be “the greatest change in the AEC industry in more than a generation,” according to the latest CIFE survey, which was released in November 2007. But many firms that have incorporated BIM into some or all of their new work are still sorting out the nuances associated with working in a different medium and the difficulties inherent in implementing a new technology.

This is because implementing BIM is a very ambitious undertaking. The first notable BIM projects involved such high-profile, complex projects as Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, Chicago’s Soldier Field, and Beijing’s National Swimming Centre. (See “Finished with a Flourish,” Civil Engineering, March 2004, pages 37–45; “Chicago Stadium Renovation Combines Old and New,” November 2001, page 12; and “Olympic Swimming Center Mimics Bubble Structure,” October 2004, pages 22–23.) The $175-million Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in 2003, but design work began in the late 1990s. The complex geometric shapes of the Frank O. Gehry & Associates design required an innovative approach. Using a software package originally developed for the aerospace industry (CATIA, produced by the French company Dassault Systèmes), the designers created 4-D models for use in analysis and construction scheduling.

But the process was tedious. Physical models of the building were scanned and digitized. A wire frame model was used for the structural system, and once scanned and digitized it became a contract document, according to Derek Cunz, the director of project development in the Denver office of the M.A. Mortenson Company, the lead contractor for the project. “You could not have dimensioned the building traditionally,” Cunz says. Out of that project came the realization that the lessons learned about coordination, visualization, and communication could be applied to more traditional projects, he says.

Early BIM users helped to publicize it as a tool for better coordinating design and construction in efforts to adhere to extremely tight deadlines and budgets. But as its benefits have revealed themselves, BIM is now seeing use in less prominent projects, including military barracks, office buildings, and even residences.

Since the Walt Disney Concert Hall project, software vendors have been racing to develop BIM packages that make it easier for designers to model projects. Unless all of a project team’s members—from the architect to the engineer to the constructor—are using the same vendor’s software package, combining the information into a single BIM can be tedious.

Furthermore, not all of the analysis information from a structural engineering design can be imported directly into a BIM program. “You will find that about eighty percent of the information comes in properly and twenty percent doesn’t,” says Joe Ales, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE, a principal in the Los Angeles office of Walter P. Moore and Associates and the cochair of the Building Information Modeling Committee, a body set up by asce’s Structural Engineering Institute and the Council of American Structural Engineers, of Washington, D.C. The problem, he says, is that filling in that last 20 percent can take as long as it would “to start from scratch and get the model that way.”

Firms that are using BIM extensively are coping with the problem in different ways.

Some large firms are hiring programmers to write code and “macros”—shortcuts to tasks that users perform repeatedly within a software program—so that analysis information can be imported into a model with greater ease. Other firms continue to manually enter analysis information into the model and are waiting for software manufacturers to add this functionality to their products.

The issue of interoperability among different software packages is a significant one and can affect project team dynamics. Firms that are not using the same software package may choose not to join forces on a project that requires the use of BIM because of these interoperability issues.

This underlines a vulnerability that often hampers the adoption of new technologies. BIM relies heavily on software vendors that are competing for market share with their BIM products and are therefore not particularly eager to make their products compatible. Nearly every piece of information that is critical or even just helpful to the design, construction, or operation of a building can be made available electronically, and BIM is the right tool to provide the infrastructure that brings all of those electronic data together. However, accurately translating digital information from many software packages into a single package is proving to be tedious, and the interoperability issue has become one of the main impediments to the widespread use of BIM.

For example, Autodesk, Inc., of San Rafael, California, is one of the leading suppliers of BIM packages, and it provides distinct BIM software for architects, civil and structural engineers, and mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) engineers. Generally these packages can easily transfer data to, and be coordinated within, a single model. But if the architect is using a tool from a different vendor, the BIM effort starts to become disjointed and the potential for information loss during a project increases. Such tools as those produced by NavisWorks, of Scottsdale, Arizona, can read many different modeling file formats and combine them into a single model, and they are being used for that purpose to a limited extent. But this feature does not address the issue of combining the analytical data with the BIM software. The analytical software packages used by engineering firms have existed for years and generally are not yet compatible with the BIM packages currently on the market.

Efforts on the part of software vendors to encourage open standards—standards that are free and accessible to any programmer and that would allow programmers to write nonproprietary code that the software could use—are continuing, but it may take years before such seamless interoperability can be realized. Such groups as the buildingSMARTalliance, part of the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS), of Washington, D.C., have released guidelines on implementing BIM as well as on coordinating such open standards. The NIBS document “National Building Information Modeling Standard: Version 1—Part 1: Overview, Principles, and Methodologies” was released in December 2007, but it does little to directly solve the interoperability question and reach an all-encompassing open-standard process for BIM. The discussion is well on its way but far from over.

The most influential organization to encourage the use of BIM is the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). The agency is perhaps the most influential owner and operator of facilities in the United States and has a vested interest in drawing on the benefits conferred by BIM to operate and maintain its vast portfolio of buildings. In fact, facility managers may benefit the most from the use of BIM, says Charles Matta, the director of federal buildings and modernization for the GSA. “You build a facility in four or five years, but you manage it for fifty or one hundred,” he says.

The GSA began what it calls its National 3D-4D-BIM Program in 2003 in the midst of managing an $11-billion capital investment program. The agency owns or leases more than 7,700 buildings in the United States, making it the country’s largest property owner and manager. Over the years, the need for advanced telecommunications infrastructure and enhanced security in federal buildings has made federal projects more challenging. Moreover, the agency’s Design Excellence Program, initiated more than 15 years ago, has increasingly attracted notable architects, who tend to create unique, cutting-edge projects. These projects in turn became more complex as competition in the construction market increased. All these factors resulted in an increase in the number of GSA projects that were over budget and behind schedule, according to Matta. To become more efficient, the GSA turned to BIM.

The GSA began requiring the use of BIM in all new projects in 2007 after conducting nine pilot projects. The projects included a seismic retrofit of a historically important courthouse, an energy analysis of an existing building, several modernization projects, and some new construction. The pilot program tested a multitude of individual components of the BIM process, including 3-D laser scanning, 3-D spatial modeling, and 4-D modeling for construction sequencing. It has been reported that the cost of the BIM effort during the pilot program was less than the savings realized on a single project, but those pilot projects made use only of certain aspects of BIM, not the entire process.

Because the GSA does not require a particular software package for use in a BIM, it is strongly encouraging open standards. When a few years ago the GSA began requiring BIM for new projects, it invited software vendors to a meeting to make its intent clear. The agency then asked the vendors to deliver something in an open standard using existing industry foundation classes, which are developed by the International Alliance for Interoperability, a group dedicated to improving the productivity and efficiency of the construction and facilities management industry. The GSA asked that these products include general models of a building project that would make it possible for different types of computer applications to share and exchange project information. All of the vendors delivered their models on time, and the models were more than 96 percent accurate when superimposed upon one another, Matta says. “We were firm in stating that this is what we were looking for,” Matta says. “And we were able to prove that they were capable of doing it.”

Matta contends that although the issue of interoperability involves market forces, there are ways around the problem. Most software companies are not providing translators or complete open standards that would enable programmers to easily add to the programs, but neither are they making it prohibitively difficult for clever programmers to devise ways of translating the software into different models, he says. Some design firms have figured this out and are writing their own software translators. “We know the different software packages are capable of providing output in an interoperable, open-standard way,” Matta says. So for the GSA, designers and contractors can use any software package they choose, as long as the output delivered to the GSA in the end is completely interoperable.

Matta readily admits that the goal of managing facilities using BIM has not yet been fully realized. But the agency is committed to promoting the use of BIM, and in 2004 it spent a year and a half developing model-checking software of its own. To assist consultants with the nuances of its BIM program, in May 2007 the agency issued “GSA Building Information Modeling Guide Series 01,” a document that can be used “as a reference guide for GSA members and associates when determining what BIM applications would be appropriate for their specific project,” Matta says.

As an owner, the GSA is actively promoting the move toward BIM by forcing consultants to use the technology. But other owners too are realizing the benefits of BIM, and design firms and contractors must meet their demands. The goal for owners, according to Deke Smith, the executive director of the buildingSMARTalliance, is to have a building that can produce a product or service. “Every day until they can provide that service is an impediment to the owner,” Smith says. The architecture, engineering, and construction professions can reduce the time between project conceptualization and project delivery by using BIM to shave time off the schedule and stay within budget, Smith says.

For the industry as a whole, the transition to BIM is going to happen faster than anyone thinks it will, according to Ales. Many firms are starting to use some form of BIM in all their new projects, irrespective of whether or not the owner requires it. Ales’s firm, Walter P. Moore, has used it on more than 100 projects, he says. “You can’t wait and delay to do this, because next week you are going to be getting a request for a proposal and it’s going to say you need to use BIM,” Ales says.

Firms that are using BIM have increased the capacity of their computer hardware to handle the massive amounts of data that are stored in a BIM model. They have also invested in the latest BIM software packages, hired new personnel, and established extensive training programs. Most firms have named a firmwide BIM project manager to coordinate all the necessary in-house changes. The complexity of the software and the need to change the way engineering firms work on projects require extensive staff training. “The technology is incredibly powerful and is allowing us to do things we couldn’t have done prior to BIM,” says Thornton Tomasetti’s Tamaro, “But there is still an incredible human aspect to it.”

As firms begin to incorporate BIM into their daily practices, the roles of engineers and support personnel start to change. Engineers are taking an active role in creating 3-D models that will be used in BIM simply because the design team can skip the 2-D drafting process and immediately start designing in 3-D, using actual member sizes and dimensions right from the start. On the other side of the fence, CAD operators and drafters are taking on more responsibility during the modeling process, which requires a deeper knowledge of engineering principles. Balancing workloads and responsibilities can be tricky.

“Fifteen or twenty years ago, when CAD was in its infancy, I saw more than one failure where you hired somebody who was really good at computing but didn’t know the technical components of what was being built,” says Don Arnold, the federal project manager in Burgess & Niple’s Cincinnati office. “It is important not to make that same mistake again and to think this is just a piece of computer technology.”

Because CAD has been used for more than 25 years, many firms already employ experienced CAD operators who should be able to easily make the change to the modeling software. But some senior-level engineers, whose input in developing a model for a BIM project is crucial at the early stages, may lack the advanced computer skills needed to develop such a model. Junior engineers, who tend to be more adept with computers but may not possess as much engineering knowledge, can easily get caught in the middle. In the end, however, collaboration may benefit all engineers: senior engineers may come to see the benefits of the technology, and junior engineers may learn more quickly how buildings are designed, if only because the visualization tools in BIM provide a much clearer picture than 2-D CAD drawings.

The ability to design in three dimensions from the start can also help improve communication between engineers and architects. “Visualization used to be the sole domain of the architect,” Ales says. “But now everyone can produce something in 3-D, and our architecture clients love it when we show them a 3-D model rather than a bunch of sketches.”

The companies that provide BIM software offer a variety of training packages and will partner with a major architecture or engineering firm to be an exclusive provider of BIM software. In exchange for this arrangement, engineers may undergo a daylong course on BIM in general and then spend a couple of days learning the software and several weeks working with a trainer on a real BIM project. Learning how to use BIM software and how it relates to the entire BIM process is much different than sitting down with a new version of a software package that engineers have been using for several years and just learning the new tricks and shortcuts. “It is too complex not to have the adequate amount of training for all of the people in your firm,” says Burgess & Niple’s Sponaugle.

For many engineering firms, on-the-job BIM training has proved to be the quickest and easiest way to train staff. “The learning curve is three to six months,” says Thornton Tomasetti’s Hatfield. “Once someone goes through a project in BIM, they embrace it and want to do it again.”

Educational institutions, however, seem to have adopted a wait-and-see attitude when it comes to construction technology. Many universities, Stanford among them, are just now starting to require students of architecture, engineering, and construction to take integrated classes covering all three professions, and more emphasis is now being placed on 3-D modeling. Some master’s degree programs are beginning to focus on BIM and other construction technologies, but the accreditation associations have yet to make any authoritative changes in curricula, according to Georgia Tech’s Eastman. “Just like in the different practices, the schools are struggling to figure out how [BIM] should be integrated and how it relates to the rest of the curriculum,” Eastman says.

Because of the surprising pace at which BIM has penetrated the industry, many firms have been using BIM extensively for no more than two years, and the engineering community has not been able to accurately quantify its benefits. Most firms are still in the learning phase and are continuing to invest in new software, hardware capable of handling extremely large files, and staff training. Because BIM is so new and the technologies associated with it are complex, engineering firms also run the risk of focusing too much on BIM too soon. “We are spending more time than we used to worrying about how the software works and less time thinking about the project itself,” says Sponaugle.

In view of the fact that some owners are still trying to decide how to use BIM themselves, Sponaugle’s concern is a valid one. The differences in the level of detail in comparison with architecture, engineering, and MEP packages are pronounced. The software companies started developing BIM packages for architects three to four years before the engineering packages started to appear, and many of the MEP packages lag behind both the architecture and engineering packages. What is more, the software can lack the tools necessary for a particular discipline. For example, one commonly used structural software package lacks an automated function for creating a tapered beam, according to hok’s Gayer, who spent hours trying to determine how to create one for a project. “It was a major roof beam that had to be in the model so everyone else could see it,” Gayer explains.

Each discipline faces its own challenges. For engineering it’s the inability to transfer the analysis data directly into the BIM model. For architects, even though their packages are more sophisticated, the challenge lies in the sheer number of items that need to be included. “[Engineers] have beams, columns, and braces, and maybe some foundation elements,” Hatfield says. “So we have a very limited amount of information that we have to transfer. Architects have doorknobs, faucets, plumbing fixtures, and all these different things going on. It’s a lot more information to manage.”

Once information starts to flow between the disciplines within the BIM package, such unexpected issues as nomenclature standards—or the lack thereof—can appear. Architects may prefer labeling the elements of a building in a way that is different from what engineers prefer, for example. Moreover, as the models themselves grow larger and encompass more information, the issue of computing power may surface. Many firms are breaking models into pieces because some models can take more than an hour to open owing to the large number of data involved.

Of greater importance is determining who is to manage the model during the BIM process, a question that concerns not only “the keeper” of the model at each stage of the project but also those who approve decisions at various stages. The liability issues associated with BIM are yet to be clarified, and existing demarcations of liability in the design and construction industry are blurred when BIM is used because of the collaborative nature of the effort. The good news is that since BIM can easily reveal which person made changes to the models and when the changes were made, liability issues may be easier to settle once a project is complete. But many of the engineers interviewed for this article say they still print out contract and other documents from the BIM model before they pass it on, just to be on the safe side.

Nevertheless, the advantages of BIM can be clearly demonstrated if not quantified. Engineering firms are accomplishing tasks more quickly, more easily, and with fewer people. For example, hok is designing a four-building laboratory complex in Saudi Arabia at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. The two buildings on the north side are mirror images of each other, as are the two on the south side. By using BIM, Gayer was able to produce a mirror copy of the lab buildings in less than 15 minutes.

In addition to making design easier, BIM can bring new business. Half of the respondents to the 2007 CIFE survey said that they generated new business by using BIM and its visualization tools in their bid packages. “If I were a contractor and I had no ability to create these visual models and I had to compete against a company that did, I just wouldn’t want to get up and go to work in the morning,” says CIFE’s Kunz. For some contractors, BIM has increased productivity on a project by as much as 20 percent, Kunz adds. Other productivity increase estimates for projects that properly implement BIM range from 3 to 10 percent.

The true effect of what is called life-cycle BIM, that is, taking the process beyond conceptual design, engineering design, and construction to the operation and maintenance of a building using a single digital model, has yet to be documented. But one thing seems certain: nearly everyone in the construction industry is either using some form of BIM, is actively planning to use BIM, or would like to use it in the future. And the future may be approaching faster than is reflected in the planning of some firms.

“If you asked our architecture clients a year ago whether they were going to BIM or new software, they would say no,” Ales says. “Ask them the same question today and, yeah, they are doing BIM.”