Building Information Modeling (BIM) has achieved incredible penetration in the vertical construction market in North America and in several Northern European and Asian countries. A recent McGraw Hill Construction report released in early 2014 analyzes survey data collected from construction companies that use BiM.  The survey was conducted in nine of the world’s important construction markets.  The data and analysis in this report are based on an online survey conducted with 727 contractors in ten countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US).

McGraw Hill Construction (MHC) foresees that one of the biggest BIM business opportuntities for contractors is to provide BIM models and to offer services supporting these models to owners that can be used for  ongong operations and maintenance.  Unlike design and build this is not one-off revenue but potentially decades of revenue over the lifecycle of the building.

As-built models: The MHC survey found that converting design, fabrication and construction BIM models into an accurate as-built representation for owners that represents exactly what was built  is the top post-construction activity for contractors.  MHC found that about 2/3 of all contractor who responded have a moderate to high level of involvement with this activity.  Using MHCs index for measuring BIM engagement, MHC found that 95% of contractors with a very high BIM engagement level have moderate to high involvement with this activity. 

Augmenting models for O&M: The next most popular activity with respondents was augmeting BIM models with maintenance and operations data to make it more useful to owners during O&M.  Almost half of all contractors who responded said that they had a moderate to high engagement with this acitvity.  59% of the high BIM engagement contractors said they had a moderate to high level of engagement with this activity. 

Providing model services for owners: The new service opportunity to maintain a model for an owner which MHC foresees as a major opportunity for contractors is still in the early adopter stage.   MHC found that about a  third of contractors said they were moderately or highly involved with this activity.

Regional differences

MHC found large differences between contractors in the major markets that MHC surveyed which is what you would expect in an emerging type of activity. Some regions are barely participating and others are strongly involved.  .Among all the regions surveyed, MHC found that Japanese and French contractors were most involved in post-construction BIM activities.

Business value of post-construction BIM activities

MHC found that here is still discussion about where business value can be found in post-construction activities. MHC asked respondents to identify which of the four post-construction activities analyzed by MHC provides the most value.  39% of all respondents said that the greatest value to owners was adding maintenance and operations data to models to support O&M.  Canadian contractors (53%) are most in favor of adding maintenance data to a model, but they are not as enthusiastic about maintaining a model for an owner after construction  (5%).  In contrast 39% of South Korean contractors assigned top value to the final as-built model, but saw less value in adding maintenance data (25%) and little value in managing the model for owners after construction (3%).

On post-construction applications of BIM MHC found little difference between the average contractor and contractors highly engaged with BIM   which suggests that post-construction is still such a new area that few contractors have had sufficient experience with it to assess its value.