This might be a puzzling question to some of you. Why would I hire a BIM consultant, how hard can this be? If you are reading this right now chances are that it has crossed your mind at least once. There are many factors that limit companies from using or implementing a BIM program, or if they decided to make that leap to ensure that it is done right.
Building Information Modeling (BIM) was introduced to solve the flaws and fill the deficiencies in the CAD system. The shift from CAD to BIM was a revolution in the AEC industry. BIM uses advanced methods to show the Three-dimensional representation of a building and its infrastructure. The drawings are more than straight lines and circles but consist of important information. It possesses the information of the buildings entire lifecycle that can easily be exported.
The concept of BIM is still being understood by licensed and prominent architectural and design firms. However, it still has not been widely accepted for use as a design approach. Practically in the AEC industry, the uses of modern tools are not encouraged on certain levels. Workers in the AEC industry lack the skills and motivation to use BIM because they think that they are better off using the conventional methods, and they are not compliant with new and advanced methods. This results in a lack of cooperation among project stakeholders, which leads to project failure due to the cost and schedule restrictions.
If the stakeholders of a company decide to implement BIM into the company, they can go about it in two ways.
1. They can invest their own time, money, and effort into it. They will either have to train their own resources internally or hire a bunch of experts hoping they work out.
2- They can hire a BIM Consultant to handle their BIM-related affairs.
This might sound confusing as to why the company won’t handle their personal matters themselves – whether it’s digitizing the entire company or just a simple BIM-related project. Well, there are a lot of reasons as to why most companies would prefer the latter over the former.
A Different Perspective:
Just like how when a person deals with a problem, he/she turns to their friends and family for a different perspective on the issue, the same happens in a company. A company may follow a fixed pattern of solving a problem, which may not always work. Relying on a third party, in this case, a BIM consultant can provide another approach to solving the problem.
Manpower:
Despite it being a relatively old technology now, BIM is still not fully implemented or incorporated into the curriculum of students. For this reason, you might not find a lot of candidates who have experience or knowledge in this domain, unless they went out of their way to learn it. The lack of BIM professionals has made the company hire employees and hope that they learn along the way. Even if they do, they hire one or two people and expect them to perform all BIM-related tasks. This can get time-consuming, and some companies might not have that luxury. So, a better option is to hire a BIM consultancy with expertise in all fields.
Efficiency and Being Organized:
Say a company managed to get together a few BIM experts. They will still lack the proper standards in the company, which will cause inefficient work and chaos. The key to a BIM workforce is standardization. Companies often waste hours and days on something just because they want to do the task in their own way. A proper BIM consultancy has proper rules and standards that they follow to produce organized and efficient results.
Experience and Mistakes:
It’s not that companies that do BIM-related tasks on their own are always on the rough side, but sometimes if certain practices are done in the wrong way, it can create a negative culture. They might consider it a burden or something whose cons outweigh the pros.
Apart from that, sometimes a project is too close to a problem to discover different solutions. There is a high probability that a consultant has already solved a problem like yours. With their experience and expertise, they can solve the issue in a few days while the same issue can take you weeks.
Resource Allocation
Often the project manager knows that it is essential to solve a certain problem, but he lacks the available resources or manpower to allocate. Allocating resources to another problem means reprioritizing the team’s roles. Hiring more employees to tackle the situation wouldn’t make sense either. Hiring a BIM consultant would be like having an experienced team member that is not employed full time either. It is less expensive to use them than to hire a new employee.
Conclusion
To sum it up, a lot of companies panic when faced with a BIM-related problem and end up making rash decisions. It is always a better option to rely on a BIM consultancy like BIMTM to handle your BIM needs. BIM can cost a lot of money, even more if it’s done wrong.