The Business Value of BIM for Owners SmartMarket Report focuses on the perspective of owners in the United States and the United Kingdom on whose project building information modeling is being deployed. Owners are the greatest beneficiaries of BIM (building information modeling). Even when construction owners are not actively involved in their project teams’ use of it, BIM accrues powerful benefits to them. There are several ways in which the use of building information modeling helps owners:
- Design firms always cite visualization to better engage clients and align expectations, and BIM analyses and simulations to improve design solutions as their main benefits from BIM use, and both provide benefits to owners
- Contractors’ two top BIM benefits are spatial coordination to reduce costly rework and digital fabrication to increase speed and assure quality; again, both ultimately help owners to deliver projects on time and within budget
Now that owners everywhere are increasingly becoming more directly involved with BIM, their power is even greater to align building information use with their specific goals, engage more effectively with all stakeholders and extend the value of BIM beyond construction into facility management. This new SmartMarket Report shows that current BIM owners plan to actively increase the share of their projects that involve it. Almost half of owners in both the United States and United Kingdom said that BIM will be used on more than three quarters of their work within the next two years.
Greater owner involvement with BIM will accelerate the already exciting pace at which it is growing around the globe. This research establishes owners’ current views on BIM use and value in several economies where it has gained important traction, and it will serve as an effective baseline against which to measure their growing building information modeling involvement over the coming years.