Specialist contractors "struggling" with high costs of BIM, industry briefing warns

The briefing, seen by Building Magazine, was prepared by the Specialist Engineering Contractors Group (SEC), which represents a range of interests including those of plumbers, electricians and the heating industry. The group has claimed that software providers are pushing up prices as a result of high licence fees and poor adaptability between different software packages.

"Poor practice" by 'tier one' contractors - larger companies contracted to provide a project, which then sub-contract more specialised parts of the project to the type of contractor represented by the SEC - is also resulting in additional costs further down the supply chain, the briefing said. It accused larger contractors of not bringing specialists into the design process early enough, offering poor value 'BIM seminars' and "dumping" responsibility for information management and data coordination onto sub-contractors at a cost of up to £150,000 a project.

A BIM system uses a computer generated model to collect and manage information about the design, construction and operation of a project centrally. It is especially useful where many parties, for example different sub-contractors, provide input on the same project. Any changes to the design of a project made during its construction are automatically applied to the model.

The Government set out its commitment to BIM as part of last year's Construction Strategy (43-page / 496KB PDF), led by the Cabinet Office. The report announced the Government's intention to require collaborative 3D BIM – with electronic access to all project and asset information, documentation and data – on all its projects by 2016.

The Ministry of Justice has become the first Government department to adopt BIM as part of a phased roll-out; and has adopted the technology on four prison projects. Partnership for Schools is likely to be the next candidate, according to the SEC, while in an update on the Construction Strategy published in July the Government said that it expected all seven major departments involved in the procurement of constriction to be "engaged" with the trials by the end of next year.

According to Building Magazine, the SEC was especially critical of "inadaptable software" in its briefing; saying that there is a "real danger that BIM development will be driven by software houses [rather than firms]". The briefing, which has been sent to the Cabinet office, gives an example of a firm that was forced to spend £5,000 getting a BIM model converted into a usable format.

In an update on BIM (2-page / 71KB PDF) sent to stakeholders earlier this year, the SEC said that it had established a working party to work with the Government on four areas of concern to its member associations. It called for "standardised pre-qualification requirements" for BIM, and reiterated its concerns with regards to interoperability of software.

"It is becoming apparent that having to make certain specified software interoperable could be costly," the SEC said. "Examples have been provided where a firm has been told to use certain software but, then, it has to convert it into the software package it uses to provide the level of detail required for manufacture. This could be an expensive process especially if the quality of the original model or data is poor."