B3 - Group C - The Future Advantages of BIM

As present trends indicate, the use of BIM in the building industry has become the norm. As more and more projects use BIM to succeed, the use of BIM is becoming expected by clients more and more. Current trends in green building also increase the popularity of BIM as these systems are better modeled using BIM programs. As the adoption across the industry increases the face of the industry is changing—since using BIM is a new skill set, the existing jobs that are focused on programs such as AutoCAD are falling out of favor in exchange for employees who know the new programs. In addition the intelligence of BIM programs recognizes the data placed into the program as a building rather than a collection of lines, enabling the program to check for errors that drafting programs would not catch and also enable checking codes against the model without needing a human to understand what they were looking at. The future trends of the BIM programs looks promising and time will tell what the powerful software will be able to do in the future.

One of the biggest impacts that BIM will have on the industry in the future is the changing nature of the profession and those employed in it. However, this happened when 2D drafting software became popular decades ago, and the industry evolved to adapt to this new technology, as it will with Revit/BIM. At this point, AutoCAD is still used widely, but as BIM becomes more popular, it will become the go-to software for most firms to generate drawings and intelligent information about the model. As such, employees who are familiar with BIM programs will become highly sought after and employees that do not have such experience will find it harder to get a job. However, at least for the near future, the industry standard remains 2D drawings, and many companies only use BIM to generate these drawings.

Response to Ami Amegan:

The numbers you provided on how much money BIM saves were incredible! I definitely think that as BIM becomes more mainstream and the programs improve those numbers will continue to increase.

Response to Husain Ibrahaim:

I agree with your point that BIM helps clients visualize the building better. I have friends who don’t know how to read plans or sections and it is very difficult to explain to them how it relates to the rest of the building—a 3D model makes it easy to show parts of a building to a potential client.