Brad Wyant (00:09)
Good morning and welcome to Management Under Construction. I'm Brad Wyant.
Dee Davis (00:13)
And I'm Dee Davis. And today we are going to be talking about building information modeling, or as we know it in the industry BIM. We're going to talk about where we've been, where we are now, and where we're going in the future with building information modeling. If you've been in this industry for any length of time, I'm sure you've encountered it to some degree. For those folks that do larger complex projects, we do this stuff all the time.
So what is building information modeling for any of you who are maybe newer to your career or newer to this topic? It's a 3D representation of a building, its structure, architecture, systems, and equipment. We use it for design, coordination, and clash detection so that we draw things virtually to make sure that we're putting them in the right place and they're not going to run into each other out in the field when we go to start install. Sometimes it can be also used for building.
maintenance and we'll talk a little bit more about that later. Brad, what's been your experience with BIM?
Brad Wyant (01:18)
I was first introduced to BIM a couple months into my construction career. And I always want to know what acronyms stand for. Anybody who's worked with me knows that I care about the words behind it. And so they said it's the BIM model, the Building Information Modeling model. was like, all right, well, why do we call it that? I get it. It's just one of those anachronisms that we use in life that makes life shorter and faster and easier to talk about. And it wasn't until later in my career that I was able to
manage the clash detection process that really got a deeper understanding of BIM and how powerful it was, but also how costly it can be. One of the things people say on job sites is that everybody gets a clash detection done on a phone call somewhere virtually, and then we do real clash detection out here in the field. And that can be true on some jobs. It can not be true on others where BIM goes well.
It's all about execution like anything. BIM is not a turnkey perfect solution where you just snap your fingers and everything goes perfectly. It requires thought and careful consideration before inputting it and using it effectively. But when done properly, BIM is a very, powerful tool that can benefit jobs, that can expedite on-site management, that can help teams work more effectively.
I'm sure we'll get into these experiences here and learn about her origins with them and the beginning of her career, as well as where it lives now and what the state of the art is.
Dee Davis (02:58)
Yeah, I started working with them in the early to mid 2000s. I was working for an installing contractor that saw where this was going in the industry and they were very heavily invested into prefabrication. Prefabrication goes very well with them and you work everything out in the BIM model and then you can, you know, fabricate out of there. So they decided to go all in.
in the early stages of BIM adoption in the United States. Man, there were some serious bumps in the beginning. It is a very, very steep and very, very expensive learning curve. We'll talk in more detail about why BIM is so expensive because I know this is a topic that a lot of people really want to understand. Why isn't it click, click, it's done?
We'll talk in some detail about that. The origins of BIM go all the way back to the 1950s. In 1957, the first CAD style program called PRONTO was created by Dr. Patrick Hanratty in cooperation with the IBM Corporation. It was basically the seed of evolution where everything else is followed.
About six years later, a gentleman named Ivan Sutherland introduced something called SketchPad. I don't know if it still exists, but it still existed up until about 10 or 15 years ago, I believe. But it was the very first graphical interface for design. So if you're older like me, you think contract drawings and clash detection, you think of big rooms full of people, individual humans, mostly men back in the day.
that are over drawing tables with pencils and erasers. That's how it was done. My dad was one of those guys and they all wore white shirts and tie. They all look like they work for NASA, white shirts and ties and black slacks.
Brad Wyant (04:57)
I have a picture in my head of that where there's a room of 40 drafters looking over identical drafting tables all with an ashtray full of cigarettes just drafting away working by hand.
Dee Davis (05:08)
Yeah, absolutely. By 1963, we were technically capable of producing digital prints, but it was not a widely adopted practice. Those roomfuls of guys like my dad with the plans and sometimes you'll see the sketch arms, but those were really not that widely used in the industry. Most people just used a pencil. I have some of my dad's old engineering tools from back in the day.
that I got when he passed, it's really kind of cool to have that stuff that he used to use when he drew back in the day. Doing overlays on light tables was still happening while we were developing the software. We started thinking conceptually about BIM during this time and architect Charles Eastman, who's considered kind of the father of BIM,
Introduced the idea of a digital representation of a building in an article that he wrote in 1975. By 1977, he created a program called Glide. They were fond of these acronyms. Graphical language for interactive design is what Glide stood for. And expanded on earlier programs that included cost estimates and structural design elements, but they were still really, really limited and not useful.
outside of the design world.
CAD software with built-in databases were available by the 1980s. And that was really the basis of where we're going with BIM, is we needed those databases to pull from. And by 1992, the term building information model was coined. Combined databases, CAD software, and the 3D graphical representation that had been being developed since the 50s, all of that's finally starting to come together by the early 90s.
Brad Wyant (07:07)
I want to stop you there because that's a pretty big revelation for me thinking about the technology that we had in the 1990s and thinking about BIM existing back then. We were still recording home videos on tape in the 1990s, right? That was still pretty like a camcorder was a was a thing this this big, which is a hard thing to say on radio about the size of three or four fists. And it had a real tape. digital film was like what?
You're using a graphics card. How much stores that have? One kilobyte or whatever it must have been back then to have been in 1992. That's huge.
Dee Davis (07:48)
Yeah, having it and having it widely adopted, not the same thing as we well know, but yes, we were able to start bringing all the elements together that were needed to support BIM as we know it today. Navisworks existed at this time, but it wasn't really the platform that we know today. in...
2007 Navisworks was acquired by Autodesk, which you know Autodesk is really where most of this stuff is living. And it just kind of lit the BIM world on fire. All of a sudden everybody knew what BIM was. We're using Navisworks to build federated models now, to take stuff from the architect, all the different design disciplines, the individual design contractors, the steel contractor, everybody.
and put it all in one big 3D representation that we can now manipulate and we can do things like clash detection. So many lessons were learned there and the company that I was working for at the time, like I said, decided to invest heavily in it and it was one of the smartest things they could have done because they were on the forefront. It was a mechanical contractor and they decided, you know what, we're going to lead the BIM effort.
We're going to take charge of this thing. We're going to learn it. We're going to grab the bull by the horns. And on all these projects, we're going to be the go-to contractor to do BIM. And we must have had 20 or so people in our BIM department, which was huge at the time because there were a lot of contractors that weren't even doing it yet. And we had an entire department dedicated to it.
Brad Wyant (09:36)
Imagine that. deciding in 1990 something to hire 20 people for a brand new type of building that you may not end up using, that may not end up being the state of the art. This was back when, you know, everyone knows the story of the laser disc versus DVD. What if you were inventing a 20 person department for laser disc and DVD became the next technology? That's such a bold business decision to make. Do you remember how it felt at that time?
to be a part of a company that was so cutting edge? Were a lot of people concerned that this was a step too far, that it was too big of a risk? Or was everybody, for the most part, really excited about the potential application of this technology?
Dee Davis (10:20)
Well, you know how it is wherever home is, that's what's normal. So that's what we were doing. It was frustrating to try to get other people on board. There was a lot of resistance from other companies. So we were a mechanical contractor. We're trying to get structural to cooperate. We're trying to get architectural to cooperate. We're trying to get electrical to cooperate. Some people were more cooperative than others, but there was a whole lot of, don't have a 3D model. So.
Just because by the way you've drawn something doesn't mean it's in 3D. As a project manager, it was important for me to start understanding this stuff. I don't know the ins and outs of the software like the detailers do. And I didn't really get at the time that I've drawn it. Okay, well, did you draw it 2D or 3D? Everybody was drawing 2D then for flat prints. Doesn't need 3D. It doesn't need that third dimension.
Well, what was happening is we were having to go in and add that third dimension into people's stuff because they weren't drawing it that way. And they're coming back and they're saying, hey, if you want me to draw it in 3D, you're going to have to pay me more money. Well, who's going to pay for that?
Brad Wyant (11:37)
gotta spend money to save money, but we gotta spend that money now to pay it off later. That's a tough ask.
Dee Davis (11:44)
It was, think, a risky move at that time because it was so early in the adoption process. It was risky. Of course it was, but it paid off in spades in the long run because that contractor in that area became the contractor that knew all that stuff. It was a sales tool really at that point when we had a BIM manager who
knew what was going on. They knew how to do it. They knew how to communicate and help the other contractors get to where they needed to get with them. We were running the show in that whole area. So it was pretty cool.
Brad Wyant (12:26)
And to be able to say in meetings, we're the advanced people in the industry, we're the ones doing this. That for an owner who may or may not fully understand all of the ins and outs of construction sounds like, well, this is the right choice. These people are at the edge of the envelope. One of the complaints a lot of people have about BIM is that it may not necessarily save time and money.
when it comes to construction data about what saves time and money, it's so hard to compare one job to another because there's so many different factors while that subcontractor didn't perform. There are often too many factors conflating data to be able to evaluate critically and say, yes, with absolute certainty, this job did better because of this and this job didn't have that. Were there conversations of that nature around that time?
Is this really saving us money or are we just sort of doing a Hollywood BIM thing?
Dee Davis (13:29)
Hollywood BIM, I like that. ⁓ You gotta figure as a contractor out there in the competitive marketplace, we're having to put this now in our estimates to cover cost. First of all, we don't really know how much it's gonna cost us to do it. So that's a huge part of the risk is how long is it gonna take? How hard is it gonna be? How many man hours should we allow for this? So it's also going into our estimates. We're trying to...
throw a dart at it and figure out how much is it going to cost? And of course, as a project manager, that's part of my budget. So if I have X number of hours to get this job done, well, some of that's going to BIM. Is it enough? And for many, many years, we spent way more in BIM than we were estimating. It was tough on these jobs. The field was left to feel like we allotted, let's say 10 % of labor.
for BIM, well, we used 14%. Okay, labor leaders, now you're starting with a 4 % deficit to your labor hours. Good luck with that. Let me know how that goes for you. Super popular.
Brad Wyant (14:43)
Or even worse, here's a partially complete BIM model. Some things are clash detected, some things aren't. And you're just going to have to figure it out, which I've seen happen as well. We ran out money and time on the BIM, so we got to work with what we have. Well, that's going to cost us even more money.
Dee Davis (15:04)
Yeah, I don't recall that ever happening to me on a job with that company. We stuck with it until we were done, no matter what it costs. And unfortunately now, like I said, you're faced with a labor deficit in the field that you just hope the efficiency makes up for it. It does significantly contribute to your ability to prefab. So there's ⁓ room to make up some stuff there. And the idea is that overall you're going to
save money and make mistakes early. The mistakes you're going to make them early in the model. It's like making them on paper before you get out into the field and have to learn the hard lessons. And I think overall you get there, but like I said, it's a steep and expensive learning curve. It requires the users of the software to not only have trade skills, but mad computer skills as well. Because anybody who's used CAD
knows it is not a user friendly software. Sorry, AutoCAD. It's not. remember having to take it in school. was terrible. It is not intuitive. It's not user friendly. Now, once you get to know it like anything else, it's okay. But there's a significant skill difference from the old days of guys with pencils on drafting tables and guys generically, obviously, but sitting in front of
computers doing BIM models now. Completely different, yet still the same technical knowledge is required.
Brad Wyant (16:41)
Not only that, I think we are packing more density into our buildings because we have BIM than we used to in the design phase. I had the privilege to go spend a week at an intensive in Basalt, Colorado at the Rocky Mountain Institute while I was at Stanford. And there, Amory Lovins, the founder of that company, Rocky Mountain Institute, brought a bunch of his
smartest people out to tell us about what they were doing. One of them was an efficiency engineer who worked on huge power plants, enormous hospitals, the biggest buildings where there was most money to be saved by increasing efficiency. And the guy was talking about how they were trying to remove 90 degree angles from buildings as much as possible to be able to reduce energy losses over the course of
the water and other fluids traveling through the building. And he pulled up this BIM model that looked like the most intimidating ball of spaghetti I've ever seen, where there were tons of things going at different angles. And I thought, boy, I'll bet it's more efficient. But if I asked a plumber to pipe that based on some drawings, it would be really confusing. his argument at the time was that, well, plumbers get paid by the hour, not by the efficiency. So really,
They're just jacking up costs with all these 90 degree angles. I thought looking back on it, that's not what was going on. Being able to organize things in an orderly fashion in the field with a bunch of 90s that make it all sit in sequence as opposed to these zanier looking disorganized systems that he was proposing with these 45 degree angles throughout the building left more room, left more efficiency, but made it a hell of a lot harder to build.
So not only do you have to have somebody sitting behind that CAD desk who understands how to build and understands code, they also have to understand the software. And all of a sudden that's a pretty expensive person to keep on staff. So the dream of that investment, the goal is that that person saves you a ton of money in implementation. And unless you do BIM right, that dream can't be realized. So how do you feel about that, Dee? Do you feel like there are
Too often people with the wrong idea about how to approach BIM not getting what they think they're going to get out of it because they're not setting themselves up for success? Or do you think that there's something else contributing to those disasters we hear about where the BIM was all wrong and we had to fix everything in the field?
Dee Davis (19:26)
Before we get to that part of it, I do have some thoughts there. I want to go back to the efficiency expert that you brought up. As somebody who has built a building that did not have a single 90 degree angle in it. It was cost per square foot, the most expensive building I've ever built.
because of what you described from a maybe energy efficiency. From that view alone, maybe he was not wrong, but the cost to construct a facility like that and the amount of mistakes that you're gonna make in building a facility like that are astronomically higher. And so you lose any efficiency that you could potentially gain in when you're.
pulling things out of a life of a building, I think it's going to take you a long time to make up for that cost. Especially in a place like a hospital, because things like your medical gases, you need to maintain the same order of gases, room to room, floor to floor. Otherwise, if you're trying to do crazy things with your piping and you cross gases anywhere, changing floors and going up into interstitial spaces and you're coming down in walls,
You keep, if you keep changing the order or you crisscross anything, you can hurt somebody. Some of these things are very, very important that an efficiency expert like that wouldn't know anything about. So that's why pipe is run the way pipe is run. You want to keep your order of pipes the same as much as humanly possible as you're racking things and you're going through spaces because
When you start switching it all up and mixing it all up, having crazy angles, you start running out of space and you're going to make mistakes that can cost you big. And you could actually end up hurting somebody in the long run.
Brad Wyant (21:31)
kind of thing that a young engineer would never conceive of sitting at a desk and thinking of ways to improve their output. It's a well-meaning person who wants to create an efficient design for the client because they want to save energy and all these great things and I'm so on board with that. But the ease of inspection and the ease of installation, the risk of mistakes is something that that person sitting behind that desk who's never laid pipe, that person's not going to have the right prospectiveness.
Dee Davis (21:59)
So what you were referring to earlier is the dream of BIM, right? We have this vision in our head of how BIM is going to make our lives easier, all the ways that we can use it to benefit our projects. The dream of BIM and the reality of BIM, at least in my opinion, are quite different. The dream is our imaginary world where absolutely everything is drawn in 3D.
The whole kit and caboodle is drawn in 3D. Everything's placed into the model and coordinated to perfection. All the clashes are resolved. We've put in every clearance, every hanger, every insulation piece, every little nook and cranny that can possibly cause a problem for us is resolved in the model. And then all we do is like putting a puzzle together. We just prefab everything and go make all the pieces fit in the field. That's the dream of BIM.
Reality is not everybody's gonna cooperate.
Brad Wyant (23:00)
including physical reality. Physical reality will also not cooperate.
Dee Davis (23:05)
yeah, yeah. Laws of physics sometimes go against you. There's an element that wasn't in the model, maybe a teeny little piece of structure. There's that beam that isn't in the right place or it isn't, wasn't drawn to the right size or that little piece of additional steel wasn't considered. So some of the trades are going to cooperate. Some not all, and some will only kind of cooperate.
The larger the contractor, the more experienced they are, the more likely that they're going to be BIM savvy and have a plan and have detailers that know this stuff and can do it. The smaller the contractor, the smaller the scope, the less likely that's going to be. So just not everybody's sophisticated enough. Sometimes the scope isn't big enough. There's contractors that are going to say, if my scope isn't worth X dollars, I'm not doing BIM. And there's
Good reasons for that. Sometimes it just doesn't pay for them to do it. Sometimes they just don't traditionally have enough scope in any given project to invest.
Brad Wyant (24:13)
Perfect example of that where dimensionality is very important, but BIM doesn't pay off. Toilet stalls. That was one of the first scopes I was handed when I was very young in my career. And I had no idea that you could get so into the details of the dimensions between urinal stalls and restroom stalls. And the guy came in and was like, yeah, I've seen this architect's work before. They have no idea what they're talking about. Let me draw you a drawing that
Actually will meet code. Okay, and this guy comes in and does this whole thing and I'm like boy Should we put that in the bin? As long as your guys build me the room in the size that's shown in the drawing my guy is gonna know how to build it the way that this inspector wants it and That person putting it in BIM and then building it the way that he knows he needs to build it is wasted effort because Once you're in the room and once it's all marked out once he lays out for the plumbers. It's okay
But then again, if it were a job where the stalls were numerous enough that prefab all of the stalls in the plumbing so that you can drop it in the wall, then that guy would have needed to give the plumbers the dimensions. it's all about, does it pay off for me versus does it pay off for the entire project? If it only pays off for the entire project, but it doesn't pay off for me, I'm not doing it. Forget it.
Dee Davis (25:39)
That's actually a really good example of a case where you have a trade contractor like the plumber who's going to be like, yeah, I'm using BIM for my work. I'm going to prefab everything. This is exactly how it's going to go in. And you've got another contractor who needs to coordinate. It needs to work together. And they're like, no way, I'm not doing it. It doesn't pay for me to do it. But those two people still need to talk. They still need to coordinate because if the stall layout
doesn't match with the actual plumbing layout, that's going to be a problem.
Brad Wyant (26:11)
huge problem if there's not that thirty three and a half inches between that and the other thing then the inspector's not going to okay and you're going to rip stuff out and it's going to be a nightmare.
Dee Davis (26:20)
Yeah. Reality sometimes does not match our little dream of really where we want to go with this. Another element is that owners really don't want to pay to make the dream come true. To model every element and every widget in the building to make sure that you have every potential thing considered is tremendously expensive and owners don't want to pay for that. Equipment vendors.
very rarely have 3D models of their equipment. Usually the detailers are waiting for approved submittals for the equipment so that they can get all the dimensions and everything and then they actually draw a 3D extruded piece that is a representation of that piece of equipment to plop into the model. They'll draw a box as a placeholder representation until they get the approved submittal.
But you better hurry up and get that approved submittal so that we know what those final dimensions are for fabrication.
So what does good BIM coordination look like? Here's my two cents based on lots and lots of project experience. A strong lead with good communication skills that understands how all of it works, that has a good working knowledge of all the different software platforms that are used, and there's quite a few. They're responsible for producing a federated model each week for coordination meetings.
They have the authority to make decisions and the authority to get things done and work with people to get things done. And they have a plan and understand what's important. And the reason I put in have a plan, cause I got a story for you. know that's a shocker.
I once worked on a pretty sizable project. was still working as a mechanical contractor and the general contractor decided they wanted to lead the BIM for this particular project. Well, they'd never done it before. They did not have a BIM department. They did not have people that had experience leading BIM. And they decided, well, we want to get this on our resume. We want to be able to say that we did that on this job. So we're, doing it.
And we begged, we pleaded, we offered the money, ⁓ seriously, because having the wrong person in that seat, was nothing personal. It doesn't mean that you can't learn. It just means that we've got people over here with more than a decade of experience, 10, 15 years experience doing this and somebody that's on day one.
I've sat in zillions of BIM meetings. Am I qualified to run a BIM meeting? No, I'm not. I'm not a BIM leader. I don't have all those skills that I just listed off. I have some of them, but not all of them. The person that ran the meetings for the project would literally start every meeting with, what are we going to look at today?
Brad Wyant (29:41)
That sounds like a headache already. I can't believe... ⁓ my gosh.
Dee Davis (29:47)
No plan. mean, talk about no plan. What do you mean? What are we looking at? You don't know. You're in charge.
Brad Wyant (29:55)
That's the equivalent of a project manager coming to a meeting about schedule being like, so are we on schedule?
You don't know already? haven't talked to your superintendent? You haven't looked at the schedule and the dates?
Dee Davis (30:09)
Yeah, it was it was astonishing. what ended up happening? ⁓ I just I giggle every time I think of this because it's so ridiculous. But we ended up happening was all of the trades got together in secret and we would have our own in meetings in secret.
Because the official BIM meeting was so unproductive that there's no way we were ever going to get through it. So we had secret BIM meetings every week that the GC didn't know about. Isn't that awful?
Brad Wyant (30:45)
For those of you in a group chat where you're suspicious that there's another group chat where everyone except you is in the group chat, this is that. This is what's happening. There's somebody being excluded because they're the worst.
Dee Davis (31:00)
They're the source of the problem. And like I said, there was no personal issue with this person. They were a great person, someone that I actually really like. They were doing what their bosses were telling them to do, and they were not qualified to do it. I don't know. I guess if you asked me, what should they have done? I don't know. I think they should have stood up to their bosses and said, we're not the right people to do this, and we need to stop stepping where we don't belong.
but they didn't do that and probably for all kinds of political reasons. Maybe they knew and they just pretended like they didn't know because they knew the job had to get done. I don't know. It's the only time in my career where I've ever deceived somebody like that and I feel bad about it, but at the same time, I didn't know what else to do.
Brad Wyant (31:49)
That's still the right solution. And talking about the person that you described earlier with all of those different qualifications, somebody who is a strong leader with good communication skills, who understands all of these different softwares, who has a responsibility to produce this federated model, authority to make decisions, people skills to get it all done, that's a pretty rare specimen as far as trying to go out into the market and finding that person.
Oftentimes what I've seen on projects is there's somebody who knows the software, who knows the other people at each company that do this job and can produce a federated model, but may not necessarily have the people skills. And they pair that person up, that VDC BIM specialist with a manager and they together run an efficient, effective meeting. Do you think that there are ever instances where
that can be better or do you think that that's only ever like as good sort of solution?
Dee Davis (32:52)
You get the right team that can work together and work together well. And I think that would be just fine. I've seen that delivery model as well. It's sort of taking that engineer that's just an engineer's engineering, has no people skills and pairing them with somebody with people and communication skills. And as long as they can work well together, it works. Unfortunately, it takes two people to do the job of what you would hope one person could do, but not everybody.
has one of those people because you're right, they're kind of a unicorn and you get the wrong person in that seat. I've seen it a couple of times. It does not work well. You start getting really adversarial meetings. You have that person that maybe has a lot of knowledge and technical skills, but they don't have the people skills. It is not a good thing.
Brad Wyant (33:42)
And this is the base truth of management. Even though we're all paid to be here, people will find ways to make other people's lives miserable if they think that that person's a jerk. And you see it all the time in big companies, you see it on job sites, grudges, and disagreements can form over the smallest perceived slight. So somebody who can manage those expectations, bring people together, and has those technical skills is somebody who
deserves every penny they're making.
Dee Davis (34:14)
I'm sure that the person that I'm thinking of right now that I know is sitting in the seat right this very day, I tried to get them as a guest on the show. I was hoping maybe we can get them in the future, but the professionalism in which they execute this work is second to none. I had the privilege of working with several different people in the industry that are just the best at doing this and they do it so well.
And I've also had some train wrecks. How do you end up with a bad model and a bad experience and you invested all this money and you didn't get a great product out of it? Well, who was running the show might be part of the problem. It is a unicorn and those people I'm sure are not getting paid enough because they are hard to find. Where things go wrong, weak leadership, lack of experience.
I have tons of experience, but I don't have tons of the right experience. If you put me in that spot, man, would I have a learning curve, especially the software side of it. I've never been a detailer. There would be such a learning curve that my lack of experience with the critical pieces of that would be a big problem. Having no plan, trying to lead by consensus. You can't do that in this environment. There's too many players.
You have to be in charge. There has to be a person who says, nope, you're moving and do it diplomatically between the trades. Somebody that's either unwilling or unable to hold other people accountable is another pitfall. Those are the things you want to avoid.
So one of the questions that seems to come up on almost every job where we are using BIM is where do the designers stop in the model and where do the contractors pick up? It really depends. I've seen it done in a couple of different spots that we'll talk about. Much like design drawing levels, there's BIM model levels. A 100 level model is conceptual design.
A 200-level model is schematic design. A 300-level model is detailed design. 400 is fabrication and assembly, and 500 is as-built. So usually somewhere around 200 or 300 is where it passes from the designers to the installing contractors. Can you guess why, Brad?
Brad Wyant (36:53)
because that's the point where expertises start to change hands. The architect can deserve the money they're getting to tell you generally what size the room should be and where it should flow within the plan of the building. But when it comes to the details of how that room gets put together, you want somebody who does that for a living designing at that point.
Dee Davis (37:17)
When you get out of schematic design, you get into detailed design and then you start playing with fabrication and assembly. We mentioned this on a previous cast. think it was the episode where we talked about management software, how some of that really at a certain point, the fabrication has to take over. And those are databases that are held by the installing contractors.
So even though we have databases that live in CAD where we can draw ductwork and piping and conduit and structural and architectural elements, when we get into actual fabrication and assembly of any of those things, it goes to the installing contractor and their expertise and their detailers and databases because they are buying the materials. There can be dimensional differences between
manufacturer A and manufacturer B of a certain fitting. So it shouldn't be left to the designers to decide what those dimensions are because they're only going to be a rough idea of what you're going to end up with, the nuts and bolts of what you need for fabrication. Somewhere between schematic design and detailed design, but before you get to fabrication and assembly, you've got to kick that model over to the installing contractors
They then kind of have to start over to be perfectly honest with you.
Brad Wyant (38:51)
And that's starting over is not even a half of it, in my opinion. There are often instances where an architect has specified a wall to be 27 feet exactly from this other wall. And everyone gets out in field and starts looking at building it. And then everyone realizes, boy, this would be a lot easier if that wall could be 27 feet, three inches from that wall because of this, that, and the other. But.
because the plans are flexible, because they've been stamped by the city, because the architect wants it exactly that way, we don't have the back and forth communication of, if we could just do this, it would be a lot easier. Or at least we don't always. On some of the best run projects, you do have that conversation with the architect and you can redline things and you can make those kinds of changes. But it's very difficult to go from level 200 of detail to level 300 detail to level 400 detail, realize there's a problem, go back up, change a bunch of stuff, and then go back down.
That gets really expensive, it gets really risky, and it can also bruise egos. It can be a very difficult thing to communicate unless everyone is on everyone's team.
Dee Davis (40:00)
Yeah, that's a very good point. Once you change hands from the design team to the contracting team, it gets more expensive to make changes for sure, because now you got all these other people involved. Once you've started detailing for fabrication, everything's precise. Every element is decided. Every elbow, every valve, every dimension is precisely determined.
with model numbers, dimensional differences and everything. If you'd move a wall three feet, well that changes the entire dimensions of the room. And now I gotta go move everything to fix it. Can you do it? Yes. Is it cheaper to do it when you're in the BIM model versus out in the field? Absolutely. But it's still gonna cost you some.
Brad Wyant (40:47)
I'll give a good example of that. There was a project I got to do where we were building restrooms. We were going to build one set of restrooms, and then after that set of restrooms were done, we were going to shut down the other restrooms and renovate them to match this new set. And the tile on this project was very, very detailed. We had hexagonal tiles on the floor. We had handmade tiles on all the walls. And as we were building, we realized
Wouldn't it be really nice if we could have the last tile as we reach the ceiling be a full tile as opposed to a half a tile it would just look prettier and By the time we realized that half the single our brain framed so on that first set we couldn't do it and On the second set however, we had a little bit more flexibility we Learned from our mistakes and we said, okay architect come look at this This is what we're have to do. We don't have the time to go back and fix it. We're on a schedule here. We're
But if you give us some wiggle room on these dimensions, let us talk to the tile installers, let us talk to the grout company about how thin or how thick we can go with these margins. We can make it so that it's full tiles throughout the entire room. There's not a single cut tile anywhere. And they were like, that'd be beautiful. And they ended up winning an architectural award for this work. It was a very cool project. When the architect was sitting there drafting, they were thinking about, well,
It has to be of this city. It has to be of this period. They were thinking about color. They were thinking about flow. They were thinking about shape. They weren't thinking about how are the ground lines going to line up? How is this all going to end? Nor should they be forced to. That's a pretty niche thing to think of as somebody who sits by the desk rather than installing tile all day. But if you can have those level of detailed conversations before you get out into the field, that's the dream of VIM is to have those kinds of outcomes that, you know,
A lot of architects talk about this idea that when you walk into a room and things are just right, you can't quite put a finger on any one thing that makes it right, but you get this feeling that it is and it really tickles you. to be able to do that kind of thing is magical when it comes out. The client was thrilled, the architect was thrilled, but every time I ever build in tile again, if I ever get the chance to build in tile again, I'll have that conversation with an architect now.
before we go set things in stone and say, let's get this really right if we want to. And maybe they'll say yes, maybe they'll say no. We'll see.
Dee Davis (43:21)
Well, winning an architectural award, I think that seems to be every architect's goal. ⁓ As a infrastructure person, my brain leans to function far more than form, but I can appreciate something like that. Like you're saying, it just adds that little something extra and makes it set off like a piece of art rather than an installation. bet you have a picture of that, don't you?
We'd love to see a picture of that. It sounds really cool. I think we've all seen those kinds of installations where we go into a place and we're like, wow, it just looks really good. And that's the artistic side of architecture. This is really beautiful. In addition to functional, that's usually the goal of architecture. So why don't.
designers do all of them because when you get to level 400, installing contractors need to be using their own fabrication databases for all the little parts and parts that they're going to be installing all the way down to manufacturers models, precise weights, connection methods, and dimensions of each component. Why don't contractors do it all? Well, sometimes they do. I have been on projects where the installing contractors do it.
from the very beginning. Is that the right choice? Maybe. It depends on the contractor. I think we're back to having those contractors that have lots of experience, that have their own in-house people. Some contractors have gone to outsourcing to other countries for detailing. I would say I've had mixed and mostly not.
fantastic experiences with that. You're dealing with time differences, you're dealing with language barriers, you're dealing with completely different ways of doing things in other countries. Different than we do things in the United States. So is that the best? I don't know. I lean towards people that I can actually look at and talk to and I can go stand at their desk and we can look at whatever's going on in the model if we need to. Maybe that's a little old school, but
In my experience, it's easier to get things done that. So when is it worth it and when is it not worth it to do BIM? I think that's the big question that we face oftentimes on projects, especially if they're medium sized projects. Do we do BIM? Do we not do BIM? It's difficult to put a really fine point on that because it depends on a lot of things. It depends on the sophistication level of your contractors.
The size and the complexity of your project. If you're building an office building versus a hospital, that matters quite a bit. The schedule of your project. If this is a really fast project, if you're out there building Jack in the boxes, BIM might not be for you. It may not be worth the investment. takes time to do all this stuff. Your project schedule may say that you need to be done building it by the time you'd be getting your model done. And the criticality of the coordination.
Do you have a lot of space to work with or a very small amount of space to work with? You have a lot of systems. It's very congested or do you kind of have some wide open spaces? There's a lot of craftsmen out there that are very, very good. They can look at it and they can lay it out in their head. My husband's one of those guys. They can get out a piece of paper. They can draw how the whole room will be laid out. Those folks are getting to be less and less in the industry these days.
I think we've become a little bit of victims of We're so reliant on it in so many cases that we're losing a little bit of that. But it can help you decide whether or not you want to invest in BIM on your particular project.
Brad Wyant (47:13)
think another factor there is your tolerance for error. If you're working on something where the output has to be millimetrically perfect, like a process plant, like a pharma plant, and everything has to line up at a gross degree, then yeah, BIM's probably going to be your friend. If you're throwing together something where if that light switch is three inches one way the other, life's not going to end, it might not be for you.
Dee Davis (47:43)
So one of the questions that gets asked all the time, why has BIM so expensive?
For an MEP contractor, which is where I've spent a significant part of my career, good BIM coordination can cost 10 to 15 % of the total labor budget. That is a lot of money, but it's far cheaper to spend the money getting it right in the beginning in BIM than it is to be correcting mistakes out in the field. The people that do this work are called detailers.
They aren't cheap by any stretch of the imagination because their experience and the skills that are required to become a detailer are not small. At the trade level, most of them have many, many years of field experience before they start detailing, which in my experience is necessary. The detailers that I've encountered that don't have that are not nearly as good as the ones that do. It takes two to three years of training.
to become a good detailer. Even with all the trade experience, the software is complicated, it's not very user friendly, and trading in your tool belt for a keyboard and a mouse is no joke. Talk about a transition.
Software licensing and hardware requirements are not cheap. The software licenses for CAD, Revit, whatever it is that you're working in are very, very expensive on an annual basis. And the computing requirements are not small. The file sizes are massive for these. And then when you're building federated models with everybody's big, huge file sizes all together, you got to have a computer that can handle that.
Computers going down means no work is getting done. So you have to have very high-end hardware to support all the software.
Brad Wyant (49:47)
and people who run that hardware to keep it up and running.
Dee Davis (49:51)
Yeah, you got to have a good IT department. If I was your IT person, it's not going to go well. Those IT people have to be Johnny on the spot when a detailer has a problem. Yep. Industrial strength internet connections are absolutely required. You don't need detailers getting in their car and driving an hour to be in the same room together necessarily. We do this stuff virtually saves time, saves money. Well, you need an industrial strength.
internet connection for that. Your regular home wifi is probably not going to cut it. So that costs money too. This is why you really don't see detailers out in the field very often. Way, way back in the day, I was on a job where I had some detailers out in the field with me, but it's pretty rare because they need desktop computers, not laptop computers. Laptops are just not powerful enough and they need internet connections that are
really, really strong and stable. And they just can't be out there in the field doing this stuff. And I think as any architect would attest, they can't work in their models from the field very well either because the internet connections and the laptops are just not strong enough. So that's why it's so expensive to have BIM. We're asking for a bunch of people with some mad skills.
to do all this stuff and experience. So we can't pay these people peanuts, peanuts in, peanuts out.
Brad Wyant (51:24)
It's another step, but it's the kind of step, if taken, that can save you rework in the field. And rework, as anybody knows in construction, is the most costly thing you can possibly spend money avoiding. So money well spent, as long as you spend it wisely.
Dee Davis (51:43)
You have to choose your detailers wisely. Shortcuts in my experience don't work well in this arena. Shortcuts of hiring people with no field experience, you're not going to get a good product because they don't understand how things go together. They don't understand how things operate in the field. And you need people that not only have the computer skills, but have the trade skills and a lot of patience because the folks that I've seen make that transition from the field into
the detailing world. They can do it, sure, but it takes a while for them to be really good at it. Two to three years to be productive and high functioning. So it's a big learning curve.
Where do go from here? That's 3D. Everything we just talked about and that's three dimensional modeling. We've heard of 4D, 5D, and we've heard whispers of things beyond that. So what does all that mean? 4D, what that does is it links the model with the schedule. I've actually got to see this laid out on some projects where they've integrated the model with the schedule and you can watch what
amounts to a time lapse of the building getting built. Which is super cool to see. What it requires is a very accurate schedule. It's just a movie production otherwise, right? An accurate schedule, a good sequence, and constant updating to be of any value at all. Can AI help us build some better sequences? I think it potentially could.
in the future, but there are so many variables and dynamic information. We've talked about AI and how it can help us in the construction industry and other CAS. Some of the problems that we have is that there's a hundred ways to skin this cat when you go to build a building, which one's the right way? Can we ever get to the point where enough information is put in to an AI model?
that we're going to get a good output or the best output possible. I don't know. I think it's going to be a while before we get there. Maybe we can, but I think there's some definite potential there. How we build, what sequence we build in. Some of it is very obvious. Obviously you have to have level one before you have level two, but how do you build level one? Do you put the level one slab on gradient first or later? I've actually seen it done later. Couldn't tell you why it was done later on a job.
But we had several stories of the building up before they put slab on grade in. I have no idea why. Couldn't tell you. But if you're building a multi-level poured building, do you have reshoring or do you not have reshoring? What's your cure time? Are you using curing agents? What kind of concrete are you using? There's so many variables that go into these timelines.
and how it's done and how long each step takes. By the time you put all that into an AI model, is it really helping? I'm not sure.
Brad Wyant (55:05)
There are some people that are trying to use AI where you give it a Revit model and tell it what some of the materials are and then it runs. And they're seeing some results, but it's a lot of an upfront investment. And the sales pitch is not there for those companies yet to prove that you're going to have the outcomes that you want, much in the way that the sales pitch at the beginning of BIM was, we're going to try and save money on the rework that we don't know may exist in this gig. And that's, think, the tough part about selling
BIM about selling any of these dimensions we're going to talk about, if you can't give your consumer, the owner, a reason to believe that their outcome will be realized, they don't want to make a purchase decision. Convincing somebody that's spending money now will save money later on things that we don't know we're going to find problems with is hard. But for those of us who have been in the industry forever, we know that spending money to do BIM well
we'll save money on all of the countless things that kept us up for weeks at a time because we didn't know that we didn't know until we knew and then it was rework and it was tearing drywall down and it was re-inspecting and it was calling people off and waiting for companies to become available again. It's these nuances of the facts of the construction industry that we all live with on a database basis that caused this to be an effective software that caused this to be an effective approach.
without the intimate understanding that we have of how badly things can go wrong, it's an awfully hard pitch to make.
Dee Davis (56:43)
We're always so optimistic at this stage of a job too. It's funny. I was just in a meeting where we're finally at a design. We're getting ready to kick off construction. It's the most exciting part of a job where everybody's like, yeah, let's go. And one of my colleagues said, wow, everybody's so optimistic. And I just laughed and I said, aren't we always at the beginning of a job?
Brad Wyant (57:08)
The superintendents, the best of them are pretty even keeled about. They can be like, well, here's another one. And the young, the project managers, everybody are like, yeah, it's going to be great with so many fun things and features and look at this. We're going to procure that. It's going to be great. And superintendents are like, we'll see. That's what you need. The we'll see attitude. It's like starting a new relationship after getting out of a bad breakup. Boy, I just lost my soul in that. this one will be different. You have to have both. You have to have the attitude of.
This is gonna be great, because you need the positivity to carry you through, but you also need the, but we'll see. It's the Sadder But Wiser Girl. That's an old Music Man reference for anybody who's a musical theater nerd like I am. Sadder But Wiser Girl for me, that's the title of one of the songs. And Sadder But Wiser is the kind of superintendent you want.
Dee Davis (57:57)
That's why they all get so cranky after a few decades of doing this. They're just like, I can't handle your optimism anymore. This is going to be hard. We just don't know how it's going to be hard yet. What's going to blow up in our faces. The thing that I think of when I'm thinking about linking the model with the schedule is I'm thinking about we're going to go in AI is going to help us. We're going to build the sequence and it's perfect until the steel guy calls you and says, Hey,
The steel delivery is going to be late in this area. This piece of the building, it's going to be four weeks later, six weeks later, something happens blowing up. Well, guess what? That sequence that you just put together that you finally just finished that you validated that you're like, ah, I got it down. Now it's just take that whole thing and crunch it up and throw it in the trash can. And you have to start all over because you got to figure out. Yeah. Now you got to figure out how.
you're going to re-sequence everything to still stay on schedule. And that's really where I'm hoping that someday we can get AI to help us with things like that so that it's not such a manual process for those superintendents and for those schedulers to sit down and go, okay, how are we going to do this? Well, that beam right there, not having that kind of blows our whole plan up. So how do we look at this differently? No beam.
for six more weeks. We can't wait six weeks. How do we attack this?
That is one of the early killers in every project that I see is that something there's a problem getting a submittal approved. There's a problem with it really can't go together that way. We've been detailing it and that's not going to work. We're going to have to relook at this moment connection. There's something that is going to delay you. We've had so much volatility in lead times off the shelf air handlers that I'm getting ready to order right now.
for this new project that we're launching, 12 weeks. These are not fancy, they're not custom, they're not big, they're nothing. They should be relatively off the shelf. I should be able to get them in six or eight weeks, 12 weeks. That's our critical path. I gotta figure out how to get those things here sooner because if not, I'm gonna be finishing my project two months late. Right out of the gate, day one. That's my problem.
Brad Wyant (1:00:30)
If.
Dee Davis (1:00:31)
It's what we do. This is not weird. This happens on every job. And in the last few years, it might be an air handler, it might be a fan, it might be some switch gear or a panel that you can't get, or that's gonna take way longer than it should take. We're hoping that someday AI can help us with all this resequencing that comes up. Maybe if I had AI to help me with resequencing, I can figure out how to do this.
some other way. We start moving on into the more Ds, right? 5D, 6D 7D 5D is adding cost data. In theory, AI could potentially be helpful in some of these scenarios. I think it could be helpful in giving you an impression of cost, but again, how that sequence is, how things go together, whether or not there's 90 degree angles in this building or every wall is wavy and custom.
I don't know if AI is ever going to have the intelligence to really understand what that means for productivity in the field or how vendor relationships and buyout multiples that contractors get influence overall cost in real life.
Brad Wyant (1:01:45)
I think being able to manipulate the schedule in real time and calculate the sorts of costs that are duration based, like general conditions and general requirements, ⁓ rentals for equipment, that kind of thing, that's an instant no-brainer. Yeah, I want to know that. But you're right, these multiples and the vendor relationships, that gets really tough to try and build into that kind of a sequencing software.
Dee Davis (1:02:16)
I think it might be good for an overall impression of cost, but I don't think you're going to be able to get down to a nitty gritty estimate necessarily without a lot of manual input and importing cost information that. Contract change might be a look, might be a little leery to share.
Brad Wyant (1:02:38)
for sure.
Dee Davis (1:02:39)
Yeah. So, um, 6D and 7D are more about ongoing building operations. 6D is energy efficiency and life cycle performance, which could be in the design phase of things, but could also roll over into ongoing building operations. 7D is facility maintenance and asset tracking. That same company that I worked for that jumped in with both feet with BIM tried
to implement this into the model years and years ago and sell it to owners. At the time it did not work. The owners were not interested in the facility maintenance. Part of the issue is, again, we're dealing with folks that don't have the technological expertise to be playing in a BIM model. Everybody likes looking at it, but being able to actually get in there
and manipulated and use it effectively is different. We also have still right now today in 2025, the majority of facilities engineers are over 50.
So if they've been out turning a wrench most of their life and haven't spent a lot of time on computers, they may not be comfortable using computers for that kind of stuff. And like I said, using a bib model, it takes some practice to be able to fly around in there and do it. I actually am not very good at it myself.
For asset tracking, owners that need to asset track already have their own systems. There's a whole host of systems out there in medical facilities in particular, where equipment moves around a lot. have a lot of mobile equipment. It works on their wifi. And they can actually tell you where exactly in the building each piece of equipment is at any given moment based on wifi ping signals. Being able to use a BIM model for all that. don't know.
and some facilities that might work. ⁓ 8D is safety, 9D is lean practices. I wasn't able to find very much around.
Brad Wyant (1:04:50)
going to say, can't imagine any safety professional I've ever met getting into a building model for the sake of doing their job. What's the sales pitch there that if you have a certain number of accidents in this part of the building as opposed to that part of the building, that could be useful data? Hopefully you're putting that in the safety report. It happened on such and such day with such and such people in this place. And then anybody worth their paycheck could be like, oh, wait a minute.
That's five incidents out of 20 that have all happened in this spot. What's going on over there?
Dee Davis (1:05:24)
Yeah, I don't know. There wasn't a lot of information that I could find in my research about 8D and 9D. As you go down the list, it started getting more more vague. It was identified and named, but not a lot of information about what that was really supposed to mean. ⁓ As we get deeper into these numbers, my doubt level raises as to whether or not these are going to be practical things, because again, the model is garbage in, garbage out.
So if you don't have all the information, you're not constantly inputting and updating, it's not going to produce any useful information. So who's going to do that? Once you're done with construction, nobody updates the model after that.
Brad Wyant (1:06:12)
Unless you have somebody very sophisticated. I'm in San Francisco right now, or I'm in the Bay Area, I'm in Oakland really. Let's say that the building engineers that run SFO are probably some pretty high tech, pretty qualified people. They're running one of the most sophisticated buildings on the West Coast, if you can call, and report a single building. They probably have people that are updating the building model to make sure that they're tracking every single piece of equipment because it's a critical facility. It's like a hospital. It's so key to infrastructure. You've got people at that level.
that are probably updating building models, but your conventional office building? No. The guy that has been running that building and knows those air handlers like the back of his hand for 20 years, that person is not updating BIM models. They have it all in their head or on a spreadsheet somewhere, but they have no need to that. It's not complicated enough to warrant it.
Dee Davis (1:07:06)
Well, Facilities uses software platforms like Maximo and there's several other ones that are built for them and all the assets are in there. It's all your predictive maintenance and all your maintenance records are in there, all that kind of stuff. And it's set up for Facilities managers. Every facility I've ever worked in, even the highly technical ones and very critical ones, they're using those kinds of programs for it.
I've never encountered a single building owner of any level that is, is updating their BIM model. They might look at it. I know some that look at their building models, but as more time passes, they become less and less valuable because it's not being updated. And after a while, other than just main structural elements, becomes a little bit useless. If there's anyone out there that is.
Using and updating their own model on the owner side, the user side. I'd love to hear from you because I would like to know about how that's working for you. I'd like to know what kind of facility it is. That would be very interesting to have that conversation, but I have never been in a facility yet that is doing that.
Brad Wyant (1:08:23)
Yeah, I agree. Anybody who's listening, if you know somebody, put them in touch with us. Let's get them on. We'd love to spend some time with them.
Dee Davis (1:08:29)
Yeah, I would love to hear their story and their take on all of this. So this is where I'm going to date myself a little bit and I'm going to say, danger Will Robinson. And if you're as old as I am, you know what that means.
Brad Wyant (1:08:43)
There's been a redux, there's been a new version of that show. It's on Netflix. Oh, know. They brought it back.
Dee Davis (1:08:48)
It's terrible. I tried watching it. I was so excited. For of you who don't know, It's Lost in Space is the original like old, gosh, I think it was even black and white. It was old, old, old show from way, way back. I watched it when I was a little kid and I thought it was a great show back then. It was really kind of stupid, but I tried watching the new one. I was so excited when the redux came out. I was like, yes, I get to watch it. I think I have a hard time when they cast.
An eight year old that's this advanced scientist. I'm like, Oh, come on. Way beyond Doogie Howser here. I couldn't watch it. But anyway, I'm being the robot and I'm going to say there's a little bit of danger here at Will Robinson because this is the same thing that we see starting to happen out in the field with the massive adoption of BIM. Is that we run the risk of becoming data input monkeys. And we stop thinking.
and stop applying our expertise and critical thought processes. This is a little bit what's happened with prefab. I'm sorry to say is that we've got folks out in the field, the younger folks out in the field, they've never lived in a world where we didn't have prefab. So they are taking the puzzle pieces and they're just joining them together and they're not thinking at all. It requires no thought on their part.
somebody else has already done the thinking for them on the front end and they're just installing. That's a problem because we're going to run out of people who know how to think about this stuff eventually. And I'm a little worried that we might be going down the same path with BIM in that if we're relying on BIM for absolutely everything up to including facilities, maintenance, safety, lean practices, all these different things, who's thinking? Somebody's got to be looking at this and
critically thinking, this the right answer?
So I also am a little concerned about getting all your eggs in one basket. You've got a single point of failure here. If everything in the whole universe lives in BIM, what if you lose it? And it's happened. I worked on a project where the architect got hijacked. The hackers come in and they hijack your software and your platforms and all your stuff in the middle of a huge hospital job.
This architect got hacked. All their platforms got hijacked and they lost everything.
Brad Wyant (1:11:23)
can't imagine that. would be the ransomware attack that affect. It's not as if architects are insured for that. They're insured for design liability for errors and omissions, not for, ⁓ sorry, we lost all our data and now the project has to stop. But data practices, I'm sure somebody who knows that world could tell us. But if you just set up things to automatically do this and that with the model or whatever, but it's still, still, it's a huge risk if you don't do that kind of thing.
Dee Davis (1:11:51)
Well, it's the native files that got lost is what happened. They were down for months and the job moves on. They weren't really allowed to talk about it because it was this whole big legal thing. And so I don't really know what all happened or how it was resolved. They had to hire somebody to come in and help them negotiate with the ransomware people. It was months. The project absolutely was impacted by that. Although I think they did a pretty good job minimizing that impact, but
It can happen. What if you lose it and your whole life is in there? It's sort of like losing your cell phone these days, right? Or losing your purse or your wallet. Like, ⁓ no, every phone number you know is in your phone. And if your phone is lost and you can't transfer your data to your new phone, it's like, holy Toledo, my entire life is gone. It's a little bit like that, only professionally. We're going to start wrapping it up here.
and gets the conclusion pros cons. Where are we going? The pros I think done properly. BIM is an extremely valuable tool for planning and coordination. Certainly cheaper to make the mistakes before you get to the field and ongoing evolution may see some gains of ease of use and integration. You have any other pros Brad?
Brad Wyant (1:13:11)
think BIM offers everybody an opportunity that they might not otherwise take to think about field implementation before they get into the field. And when BIM conversations are happening and superintendents do sit in or lead foremen sit in, it gets people's minds turning about what the next step is, where we're going to go from here and helps them prepare mentally to make those next steps easier.
There's a you're not thinking about it until you're thinking about it effect there. I think
Dee Davis (1:13:47)
Yeah, that's a very good point. And the same is true for owners. What I see when I have owners sitting in these meetings and we're walking through the model and looking at this pump and this panel, they start thinking about how they're using the space in a way that they don't think about when they're looking at a 2D plan.
they start really thinking about, wait a minute, I'm going to be standing in front of this panel and I'm going to do this and that. And you know what? That, that thing's way over there. I'm going to have to step over this. Can we, can we rearrange this a little bit to be a little bit more user friendly and avoid a trip hazard or things like that? Where when you're looking at a 2d plan, you're not seeing everything all at once. You're seeing the equipment placement on one sheet. You're seeing.
This piping over here, you're seeing that electrical over there, but you're not really seeing the whole picture until you look at it in the model. So it's very helpful for visualization for users. I wish users spent more time doing that because even though we do that and we can fix a lot of that stuff, they're not paying attention early enough. And I think they wait until it's built and then they look at it and go,
Well, can we move this stuff? Cause I don't like where it's sitting. I still see that happening. Let's look at it in the model. The cons, it's expensive. I don't see it getting much cheaper to be honest with you. Certainly can't just hire anybody to do it. You can, it probably will not go well for you. It requires unique databases for fabrication. I don't know if we're ever going to be able to get past that. It would be very nice if somewhere, someone.
Brad Wyant (1:15:12)
Mm-hmm.
Dee Davis (1:15:33)
would just create a master database of every make, model, manufacturer option, of every mechanical thing, plumbing thing, electrical thing, architectural thing, whatever. And just so that everybody could use the same database so that we can just cherry pick what we want. I think that would be helpful, but I don't think that's ever gonna happen because we're always getting new products.
manufacturers update things, change things. Who's going to keep that updated?
Brad Wyant (1:16:08)
I mean, think about the way that the CSI specifications work. We've got such a great system there with a number for every possible thing. How much of a leap is it really, digitally speaking, to go from every company having their own thing and publishing these specifications in this system to publishing a virtual 3D version of that? I think that there's reason to be hopeful that that will be the future of the construction industry.
at some point in the not too distant future, although that future is still not tomorrow.
Dee Davis (1:16:44)
Well, you're more optimistic than I am. guess just having worked with so many vendors over the years and knowing that they're always coming out with new lines, they're always tweaking and changing and improving things where it actually would matter in a 3D model that I just don't know. I don't know. Maybe we can. It would be great if we could because I think if we were all using the same database,
It could streamline things a bit and it would have to be a live database. That's also the danger is if there's, if there's changes and updates going on in the background, then you're not realizing they're happening.
It would have to be set up so that it's going in and updating the things you already drew. So I'm just thinking if there's a dimensional change in a fitting, for example, the new fittings that you draw are grabbing the new thing, but what about the fittings you've already drawn? Now you're going to have wrong dimensions and you won't even know. Whereas if you consciously are aware that there was a change, you're going to go in and fix it all. Those are the things that run through my head.
I've had things like that happen on jobs halfway through the manufacturer changes something and I can no longer get the old thing and I can only get the new thing and now I got to go redraw stuff. Or I can't get that thing anymore halfway through the job. Some manufacturers it's interchangeable. The dimensions the same for this widget and that widget. Some manufacturers don't play well together and that's not true. So you can't mix and match and have it all come out the same. I think it's definitely difficult.
to maximize the potential of BIM. I think BIM has probably endless potential to make our lives better, easier, more streamlined, and help us out in the field. But I think it's very difficult to maximize that potential because there's so many variables.
Brad Wyant (1:18:44)
Yeah, I think you're right. think knowing what the right point to stop investing in BIM is, understanding how one change can cascade through the rest of the job, convincing the people that set these budgets, your estimating department, to put enough money aside for BIM, to put enough time aside for BIM, these are all very challenging aspects of this endeavor.
But we got to figure it out. We got to find a way to get the data to prove that BIM has these effects. We've got to, as an industry, sit down and come up with better systems and processes for doing this, minimum requirements for what qualifies as federated models, as coordinated design. And as we continue to evolve in that practice, we're going to get better and better results.
Dee Davis (1:19:36)
Well, there have been some pretty good leaps in standardizing how we approach BIM and just even 100, 200, 300 and defining those. There has been a lot of work done and those are standards now that we didn't have 20 years ago in BIM. We just didn't have it because it wasn't well enough adopted and adapted yet at that time. So there are whole BIM committees out there. There's whole
Organizations that do nothing but look at BIM, talk about BIM, figure out how to use BIM better. There's tons of stuff out there. I've been a guest on a couple of BIM panels from a contractor's point of view. So there's people that live their whole life doing all that stuff. So they're absolutely out there doing that.
I would love to have one of them on sometime and tell us where are we going and how are you really working on this? What kind of a pace are you seeing in the background that we're maybe not seeing in the foreground yet?
Brad Wyant (1:20:36)
Well put. I think that leaves us a very good place for people to go do additional research if they want to.
Dee Davis (1:20:42)
Thanks so much for joining us. Have a great day.
Brad Wyant (1:20:45)
Bye bye.
Dee Davis (1:20:56)
Watch us on YouTube at YellowstoneProfessionalEd.co. Don't forget to like, share, and follow us. Apple, Spotify, everywhere you listen to your podcasts. You can email us with questions, comments, and suggestions at heyd at managementunderconstruction.com. That's H-E-Y-D-E-E to get me or Brad at managementunderconstruction.com.
