Has BIM Increased Our Productivity?

I get that question a lot. When I first started promoting Revit as a replacement for AutoCAD, I talked about how Revit would reduce the time it took to complete a project.

…but that’s not what happens.

I don’t see a dramatic decrease in project delivery time, but I do see an increasing ability to deliver projects.

My experience – and that of many others – has been that Revit does enable faster creation of drawings. I can certainly produce a set of drawings for a generic building a lot faster in Revit than AutoCAD; however, increased project demands such as design complexity and timeline/budget constraints make it hard to see a measurable improvement in project delivery speed. Managing the rising levels of information and data required on projects inhibits our ability to quicken our pace. That being said, we have seen a measurable improvement in the quality of our deliverables and our service.

Measuring these more qualitative analytics can be difficult due to the diversity of our projects. Each project is unique, with a distinctive set of constraints and demands.

I can honestly say that some of our projects would not have been successful if Revit had not been used. As opposed to following traditional CAD methods, using Building Information Modeling (BIM) allows us to deliver a more concise, thought-out design that is better coordinated and executed, and with fewer staff.

The benefits of using BIM go beyond delivering a set of drawings. 

Quite simply, BIM helps us do better work for our clients.

Sc.