Every contractor knows that winning new projects is not an easy task in today’s highly competitive business environment. To win the game, the contractor needs to have the right price, be able to point out key risks that can arise in the course of construction work and clearly differentiate from the competitors by providing the ‘little extra something’ that the owner considers an additional value.
In this blog series, I’ll explain, how modern BIM and virtual design software provide contractors with new means to identify the critical risks, compete with price without scarifying the margin and finally, prepare and present the winning proposal.
What is a combined BIM model and why would a contractor need one?
As a contractor, it is naturally in your main interests that all of the designed technical elements fit together and can actually be constructed on site. That is why paper-based plans or incomplete design data provided by the project owner usually mean extra work before you can give an accurate proposal. We all know that a proposal, which doesn’t fully cover all of the construction steps, is likely to cause big headaches when the building starts on site.
Often the project owner may have an abundance of designs – for instance, separate designs for bridges, intersections and underground pipelines – and all of these designed with different software and in different data formats. A thorough analysis of the key elements is likely to take a lot of time – unless you can create a combined BIM model and use that on the basis of your proposal.
A combined BIM model allows you to look at the key designs all in one view showing in a concrete manner, how both designed and existing structures actually fit together. Are there, for instance, underlying elements that should be considered when the work starts on site?
A combined BIM model allows your project team
to visually analyze constructability,
understand the costs involved and
come up with the best solution to build.
The best-of-breed software (such as our VDC Explorer) can combine data from multiple different data formats, for instance, open data formats like LandXML or IFC commonly used for combining technical systems. With the combined BIM model in place, you can base your proposal on an actual digital prototype of the construction project that helps the whole project team to visually analyze constructability, understand the costs involved and come up with the best solution to build.
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