Strategic BIM Investments: How to Maximize ROI in Construction Projects

Building Information Modeling offers a complete solution framework for AECO professionals to ideate, visualize, and create building designs aiming at higher value and efficiency across parameters of cost, time, and material utility. Let's explore Strategic BIM Investments.

BIM, in a larger reference, helps teams to collaboratively create data-rich digital construction models leveraging hyper-integrated service platforms and tools for detailed drawings and accurate documentation to achieve highly functional and accurate building designs.
Though BIM is intrinsically meant to offer higher design accuracy, cost-efficiency, and constructability in the process, with a project-focused strategic BIM investment plan in place, it can help teams maximize ROI in construction projects.

By aligning BIM with the project-specific requirements and implementing it across the system with a tactical approach, the digital tool can be transformed into a long-term asset driving value innovation and profitability across the project lifecycle. BIM-led objective-aligned operational planning, resource training, technology integration, and process compliance can help project teams achieve higher conversion value and increased return on investments.

This article discusses major strategies project stakeholders and service professionals can implement in their BIM-led construction project to optimize productivity and returns at scale:

Strategic BIM Investments: Key Strategies for Maximizing BIM ROI

Here are some of the key strategies to adopt and implement within the BIM process to maximize ROI:

Align BIM with Business Goals

When BIM is aligned with the business process KPIs and productivity factors such as fewer change orders and faster delivery cycles, its value becomes tangible and defensible. Every project owner needs to implement BIM technology beyond the capacity of a digital construction tool, formulating it to address operational challenges and work toward value objectives and performance goals. Here, organizations should clearly identify their priorities around enhancing quality, minimizing costs, accelerating timelines, and reducing risks to build a BIM-driven action plan to best serve their business goals.

Implement BIM Early in the Project Lifecycle

Implementing BIM early in the process helps project teams keep everything aligned and coordinated across the process throughout the project phases. This eliminates possible deviations and gaps and reduces the chances of conflict between functional resources. This results in higher accuracy, enhanced collaboration, and seamless compliance through the line of action. This helps teams to have more functional autonomy and control over optimizing workflows early in the initial stages, improving risk predictability and tolerance while facilitating deliverability and constructability at scale.

Standardize Processes and BIM Execution Plan

Digital construction processes should be based on a well-structured BIM execution plan. These processes should follow standard protocols and consistent practices at length. Standardization in the process allows projects to achieve greater transparency and clarity across functions. Communication systems with proper naming conventions and procedures for delivery enable greater compliance with processes, fewer coordination mistakes, greater efficiency in processes, and shorter turnover time, ultimately leading to high returns on investments.

Leverage Automation and Data-Driven Workflows

A system that relies on manual workflows is generally prone to human errors and inconsistencies. Through strategic BIM adoption, project management can tap into advanced technological possibilities to leverage automation and data-driven workflows. BIM-enabled automation helps teams to build and implement standardized processes and structured systems that are efficient and accurate beyond human capabilities. Digitally automated processes can coordinate functions, allocate resources, align workflows, review quality, measure KPIs, and generate reports demonstrating enhanced operational efficiency and significant cost savings.

Invest in Skilled Teams and Continuous BIM Training

Construction practices keep evolving in pursuit of value through process automation and skill upgradation. While processes can be automated through strategic technology integration and data-driven workflows, skills necessarily require dedicated context-aware learning to adequately support the need for upskilling and training within the system. By providing the needed skill training and upgrading the resource capability of your team from time to time, you acquire a broader knowledge pool, enhanced process accuracy, and greater production efficiency, eventually leading to higher ROIs.

Commit to Stronger Stakeholder Collaboration

BIM as a project visualization and management tool, brings all stakeholders onto a common platform to cohesively engage and collaborate to accomplish project goals across functions and phases. BIM-based processes allow different stakeholders, including engineers, architects, contractors, operators, and owners, to come together on a shared digital construction environment for real-time coordination and adaptive communication. This results in greater functional exchange and faster deployments, leading to increased value compliance and greater investment returns.

Enable Performance Tracking through BIM KPIs

It is important to measure the impact of BIM and allied tools to depict and describe performance indices of a project. Project owners and management teams get in a position to make more effective executive decisions, reaffirming value objectives and reassessing the execution map, with BIM-driven KPIs. The teams that can utilize advanced BIM software data and process analytics to view and compare the shift in numbers and frequency of RFIs, clashes, change orders, schedule variance, and cost overruns are at the top of taking control of the process and driving the situation in their favor.

Scale BIM Tactically Across Projects

Consistent implementation of BIM across similar project types or portfolios increases return on investments. Lessons learned from one project can be utilized in the next and so on, thus offering increased efficiencies and a reduction in setup time and execution cost. Strategic scaling transforms BIM from a project-level tool into an enterprise-wide capability that delivers compounding returns for construction industry projects.

Focus on Lifecycle Value, Not Just Design Savings

While the savings accrued in the design phase are important, the real value of BIM in terms of ROI comes from its lifecycle benefits. Indeed, accurate and data-rich models underpin better facility management, optimize maintenance, ensure energy efficiency, and reduce future renovation needs. This is the reason construction professionals are increasingly considering BIM as a long-term asset and unlocking the far-reaching value from it well beyond project delivery.

Establish Data Quality and LOD Governance

If there is no systematic BIM strategy plan to control data quality, BIM models may turn out untrustworthy for any use downstream. Well-set standards regarding Level of Development, benchmarks for the data accuracy and quality, and organized validation checkpoints ensure that the development of models is strictly for the intended purpose. Data governance can reduce rework and support the use of BIM data seamlessly across the construction planning and asset management workflow.

Wrapping Up

Investing in BIM strategically is not merely an adoption process. It can help with smarter decisions, streamlined processes, and predictable outcomes. With all construction data points and project resources being in a contextual sync with the business strategy and data governance being imposed throughout the lifecycle of projects, the risks, costs, and productivity of the projects can be improved at scale, leading to greater turnaround value and returns.

Must Read