Public sector projects worth £9.75bn are already using Level 2 BIM, a figure revealed by the BIM Task Group’s David Philp FCIOB at a BIM discussion forum held last week to mark the launch of the CIOB’s BIM+ website.
Philp was joined by senior thought-leaders and practitioners on BIM as well as representatives of SMEs and clients at a round-table event that will be feature in the January edition of Construction Manager.
The round-table was hosted by law firm Olswang, which has collaborated with the CIOB on the "BIM-ready" Complex Projects Contract.
Philp said that the £9.75bn figure indicates that industry’s capacity to work in BIM is scaling up ahead of the April 2016 mandate.
In a video interview recorded after the event, he said: “We are starting to see an ever-increasing amount of pipeline growth, in terms of BIM-related tenders and opportunities. At this time, the public sector has over £9.75bn of Level 2 projects going through.
"At the same time, we’re also seeing an ever-increasing amoint of tenders and other projects in the private sector. Clients now are very good at procuring all their data for a project in digital form."
Philp concluded: “So as we start to build it’s vital that everyone understands their role in the transformation of the world from analogue to digital.”
The discussion centred on answering the question “BIM: is the industry ready?”, and the general view was that construction was adopting the right mindset to meet the April 2016 mandate.
But there was evidence that adoption would progress at a variety of different speeds – or “swim lanes” in the terminology of EC Harris’s head of research and insight Simon Rawlinson – and with a strong possibility that some clients and contractors would be left trailing.
The discussion also threw up a number of unexpected insights, from Balfour Beatty BIM director Peter Trebilcock’s view that many clients were still “BIM neutral” to the fact that design firm Bryden Wood was on a mission to recruit astrophysicists to deliver its BIM data strategy.
