'The complexity and rapid paced development of today's projects are challenging the industry to find new, innovative approaches to project delivery. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is emerging as high-tech, process transformational method to address some of these challenges. The BIM methodology enables owners, consultants and contractors to visualize and understand evolving designs and collaboration issues as never before. These information packed digital assets are transforming the way supply chain partners work together to improve the design and construction process by enabling early identification and removal of problems. This is resulting in cost and schedule benefits and assisting fast track projects to avoid costly delays. In addition to the benefits to design and construction, the digital assets associated with the BIM offer potential to improve the facility management and operations process long after occupancy begins.

As interest continues to grow in BIM among engineers, architects and contractors, a lot of attention has been focused on BIM based project delivery benefits associated with multi discipline coordination of designs and identification and elimination of interferences between disciplines. While such coordination is impressive, BIM based delivery methods have the potential to reach far upstream and downstream in the delivery process. A holistic view of BIM will surface many other interesting value propositions.

Consider the structural engineer’s perspective. Our traditional approach to design has relied heavily on the generation of sophisticated analytical models to describe the structural system of a building. These analytical systems are transformed into drawings for distribution to the project supply chain. Since these drawings and analytical models are not linked, much time and effort are normally required to ensure that changes to the analytical model are consistently reflected on the drawings and visa versa. This disconnect is legendary for its contribution to errors and omissions on today’s primary work product, namely 2D drawings. As a data-centric process, the BIM based delivery approach employs a consistent digital representation of the structural model. This data model is then used to generate the required drawings. Drawings are extracted directly from the BIM, then annotated to suit any particular requirements. The production of these documents is not done independently of the model so they are in effect linked. As such, member sizes, dimensions and other details reflect exactly what is modeled. The potential for error and omission is reduced.  ...'