During our recent trip to visit customers in the Nordic countries, we produced a Fridays with Vico episode on how many of our customers are rolling out BIM across the enterprise.  This video clip is excerpted from that webinar.

I'd like to steal from David Letterman and give you the top ten reasons to use 5D BIM.

Number Ten:  Certainly your competitors are saying that they are using it.

(Page 33 of McGraw-Hill's BIM SmartMarket Report cites that the most important benefit for Contractors is to market BIM capabilities to win new clients.)

Number Nine:  Certainly the owners are asking for it.

(Page 34 of the same report states that "Owners who use BIM see a very high rate of ROI."  If you'd like to hear Steve Jones talk about this study, please tune in on Friday, January 29th at 12 Noon Eastern: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/295608280 )

Number Eight:  I know that many of the young smart personnel that run your projects want to use it because we talk to them frequently.

(Vico Software is a proud supporter of the Associated Schools of Construction Management's Reno BIM Competition.  Last year, the first- and third- place teams used Vico Software to prepare their projects.)

Number Seven:  The subs want to use it; they want a better and more organized piece of the pie.

(Research shows that optimizing your schedule with Vico Control decreases schedule duration by 10% without exposing the project to any additional risk.)

Number Six:  The CEO of your company wants you to use it. 

(Your CEO wants to win more business. Period. With most GCs putting together a model for the bid, your firm can stand out from the pack when you explain to the owner that your model is not just for marketing - it will drive the schedule and keep the project on budget.)

Number Five: It would be really great to know if the subs' quantities are actually correct.

(Vico Office Takeoff Manager extracts the construction-caliber quantities from the model geometry from which the schedule and estimate are derived.  When a sub-contractor submits a bid, you can check their quantities against yours.  This then ensures the labor assumptions and productivity rates are correct.)

Number Four: You could actually use unit prices from your subs that are loaded and you could fill in the quantities if you had a great and very exact model and quantity takeoff from it.

(See above!)

Number Three: You may want a Trimble Total Station and the partner software that Vico has to layout your MEP, as well as your concrete, formwork, and anything else using the robotic Total Station and LM80.

(Seismic bracings and hanger placement can be modeled, transfered to the LM80, and shot on-site with the Trimble Total Station.  For more information, check out the Trimble eipsode of Fridays with Vico.)

Number Two: you may want a flowline schedule to help you finish early. We've been talking this week in Helsinki to very large companies like NCC, Skanska, and Hartela. These are all very large construction firms that are all completely standardized on Vico Control. So flowline schedules really do run the projects over here where scheduling is so important because of the long and deeply cold winter.

(Mark Sawyer answered his own blog post, "Who Is the International Leader in Virtual Construction?," at the BIM for the Enterprise webinar.)

And Number One: The number one reason to really understand this stuff is you've got to win the project. There are many companies bidding for every single project and it's very clear that companies that deeply understand this and can explain to the owner how they can remove risk from the project, how they will better manage the project, will win. And while I can't mention names right now we have a few projects that are north of $100,000,000 that have been won recently because of this very reason. We have talked with the selection committees and they have said that the difference between the winner and the loser was not all the other items they considered, but it was their ability to use and to bring to bear this 5D methodology to de-risk the project.

What is your reason for using BIM?  Or perhaps a better, more pointed question: why aren't you using BIM?

If you're interested in this topic, you'll also want to research:

Blog: The BIM Washers Versus the Real Deal

Blog: Talk the Talk AND Walk the Walk with BIM

Blog: Differentiating Your Firm with 5D BIM

Blog: BIM Doesn't Come in a Box

Blog: 5D BIM Versus 50-Yard Line Tickets

Blog: The Top 10 Ways to Derail Your BIM Initiatives

Webinar: The BIM Master Class Series

Webpage: The D's of BIM

Webpage: The 5D BIM Checklist