Level 3 BIM For Standardised Design Delivery, Refinement And Optimisation: Is It A Real Option In The UK? CIB World Building Congress 2016

Building Information Modelling has been hailed as a panacea which will overcome the endemic fragmentation and collaboration issues in the UK Construction Industry. The Government?s target to make BIM mandatory for all public projects from April 2016, and its roadmap to Level 3 BIM are extensively discussed in the literature. It is now clear that a number of large main contracting companies such as the Kier Group, Laing O?Rourke have been positioning themselves as the market leaders in the delivery of projects using BIM. Despite such developments, the Government?s push and the general desire within the industry to make collaboration happen through BIM, industrial experience points to a number of important issues which can only be resolved by changing the way building projects are developed and delivered; and the way facilities are managed. Such changes would help close the performance gap by establishing feedback loops between operations, construction and design stages. This paper reports on the findings of an Innovate UK-funded research project which aims to bring about these fundamental changes in the delivery, refinement and optimisation of standardised school designs. It sets the background by describing the context of this jointventure between a major UK contractor and a local authority owned specialist offering national procurement frameworks. The multi-method approach to collecting, analysing and making sense of the case study data is explained. The key issues in achieving and using Level 3 BIM, e.g. competing processes and systems within the main contracting company, different levels and extents of use amongst the design and delivery teams, are then identified through one aspect of this case study. This discussion paves the way to establishing when, where, why and how Level 3 BIM should be utilised. The paper thus makes a novel contribution to the existing literature on BIM as it illustrates that BIM is not necessarily one size that fits all in terms of collaboration.