National BIM survey results
The 2016 NBS National BIM Survey has revealed a construction industry that is BIM positive but not BIM ready.
Now in its sixth year, the NBS National BIM Survey provides the most comprehensive and up to date picture of BIM (Building Information Modelling) implementation within the UK construction industry.
The findings of this year’s survey come at a crucial moment for BIM, following the requirement of the implementation of BIM at Level 2 on all centrally-procured public sector projects.
The good news is that in the five years since the former chief construction adviser, Paul Morrell, set course for Level 2 BIM as part of the Government’s construction strategy, awareness of BIM has become almost universal at 96%, compared to 2011 when 43% of those questioned in the very first NBS National BIM Survey said they did not know what BIM was.
This year’s survey has measured the construction industry’s current adoption of BIM at 54%, up from 48% last year, with 86% of those respondents who are aware of BIM expecting to be using it by this time next year and 97% within five years.
In a further boost to the Government’s BIM strategy, almost three quarters of those surveyed (73%) agreed that BIM is the future of project information in construction and a similar percentage (75%) agreed that they were clear that they needed to use BIM for public sector work.
However, in terms of being ‘BIM ready’, a significant number of those surveyed, 41%, said that they were not clear on what they have to do to comply with the BIM mandate, with only 10% believing that the construction industry is now ready to deliver on the Government’s 2016 requirements. More than a quarter of respondents (28%) feel they lack skills and knowledge, describing themselves as “not very” or “not at all” confident when it comes to BIM.
The majority of construction professions do though appear to understand the government motives for pushing BIM and believe it will help deliver specific targets of the construction strategy, such as faster delivery and lower costs.
57% believe BIM will help to halve the overall programme, from inception to completion, for new build and refurbished assets. In addition, 63% agreed that BIM will help deliver the targeted reduction of a third in the initial cost of construction and the whole life cost of built assets.
For this to happen, the survey suggests more needs to be done to generate greater collaboration and ensure BIM is not restricted to the design stage. Just over a third (37%) of construction professionals said they had used BIM models from the start of a project to its very end and only 16% had passed on a model to those responsible for the management of a building. There was also widespread agreement (65%) that BIM is not yet standardised enough, with fewer people overall using the standards that have been created than have adopted BIM.
In terms of client demand for BIM, the majority of BIM users (70%) are of the opinion that clients will ‘increasingly insist’ upon it, with nearly two thirds (64%) agreeing that adopting BIM had given them competitive advantage.
Of those yet to be converted to BIM, the majority (55%) expressed concern that they will be ‘left behind’ if they don’t adopt. Half of this number felt BIM was too expensive to consider at this moment in time, a response consistent with previous years’ findings where cost has been identified as a barrier to increased BIM adoption.
New to this year’s NBS National BIM Survey is a geographical breakdown, which reveals that the UK’s BIM hotspots, in terms of adoption, are London and the North East as well as Northern Ireland and Wales.
This summary of findings is taken from the NBS National BIM report 2016. The full report will be available in due course from www.thenbs.com/knowledge/national-bim-report-2016-summary and includes in-depth analysis and commentary from across the construction industry.