BIM Overlay is the process of rendering complete BIM model holograms on jobsites on a 1:1 scale with reasonable accuracy.
There’s a market opportunity to be the contractor who established data communication means and methods. If you just execute 10 projects to be great at it, your company will be known for “having all the data.” Let’s unpack it.
BIM overlay is a growing Construction Tech that addresses the problem of miscommunication on the jobsites. Miscommunication is the #1 cause of stop work and rework orders. Some projects’ rework value can be as high as 10-15% of construction volume.
Instead of looking at the contribution of BIM Overlay to the industry overall, let’s focus on how it can help shape your organization’s strategy.
Let’s start with identifying stakeholders and their roles. Owners and owner reps look at projects as an investment and risks. The owner is a sophisticated investor operating on at least a few scenarios. The main goal is to decrease the risk. Every minute of construction reduces risk.
General Contractors are there to coordinate the work put in place by the subcontractors and hold all project participants to the terms of the contract.
Subcontractors convert labor, effort, materials, and time into an asset–the building. Everyone needs to be better at communicating and finding, distributing, and accessing data.
At a high level, BIM Overlay connects project stakeholders around the single source of truth–BIM. Stakeholders can immediately communicate any change of the design intent throughout the entire decision-making chain. Similarly, any field constraints can be escalated with much more actionable information, just by the fully-immersive nature of technology.
Your organization can be that agent of change on all your key projects and address the topic of eliminating rework or stop-work orders. What if your value proposition is that you provide your field teams and all other stakeholders complete access to the information they need to make decisions in the field for the benefit of the project.
Access to the information by all stakeholders is an achievable goal.
- Agree with stakeholders on what information is needed for them to make decisions
- Run automation in BIM to retrieve this data and assign it to relevant elements
- Use BIM Overlay to bring the data to the decision-maker in the field.
Do this for ten projects in a row to get great at data access. You will see how quickly your enterprise will get a “knowing all the data” reputation. And that will change the way you bid on projects and price your work.
