Submitted by Angela Walters on Thu, 27/08/2020 - 15:05
The University of Cambridge is approaching the market to engage with potential suppliers for the provision of a report on the economic impact of the implementation of Building Information Management (BIM). This work is necessary to articulate the value and impact of BIM to influential stakeholders in the built environment and construction industries. These include senior government officials and civil servants, business leaders and other influential stakeholders.
The implementation of BIM across the built environment has been designed to increase efficiency and reduce cost in the construction of new assets. There is increasing awareness that the principles of BIM can be applied across the entire lifecycle of an asset to increase efficiency and reduce cost across the entire lifecycle of the built environment – both existing and new. CDBB commissioned PwC to undertake a study to develop a BIM Benefits Measurement Methodology (BMM) and to test this approach with specific case studies to quantify the benefits of BIM. The study found that BIM delivered significant benefits, some of which could be captured through the BMM and some which couldn’t as BIM can also deliver benefits which are safety, monitoring and reputational related and therefore harder to measure. The study also found that there could be additional benefits from BIM if more widely applied through standardisation.
Managing information about the built environment can enable us to get more out of existing and new assets. Whilst this concept is becoming increasingly understood, the quantification of benefits from information management in the built environment is not yet well developed. The recent and ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated and suggested that organisations with a higher degree of information management experience a higher level of organisational resilience, however this link needs to be empirically demonstrated.
CDBB would like to commission a further study to better understand and quantify the benefits of information management by building upon the work completed in the BIM BMM. The purpose of this report is to support decision-makers in understanding the benefits of investing in information management and how that investment can support economic recovery and increased resilience in the future.
CDBB has set out an approach to developing an information management framework and the study should include a prospective view of how using the information management framework will confer benefits across the built environment.