Industry Manager – Infrastructure
Geospatial World
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Digital transformation of the Indian infrastructure sector needs a faster pace to be a key driver of development, innovation, and value-addition.
Due to the presence of global players in the ecosystem, the sector is realizing the potential of disruptive digital solutions such as BIM.
One of the key reasons for the slow adoption of BIM hitherto has been the lack of initial investment needed for acquiring technology solutions and training the workforce. Most decision-makers and industry leaders remain unaware of the varied nature of Return on Investments (ROI) in BIM.
It is extremely important to understand and realize the ROI to make informed decisions in terms of BIM adoption. Apart from the usual time and cost-saving benefits, BIM has the potential to deliver end-to-end sustainable infrastructure project delivery.
Calculating the ROI of BIM adoption will enable infrastructure development agencies and construction firms to optimize their investments in a proper manner. It will enable them to assess the organization’s BIM maturity level for future business transformation.
Today, at the most only 20 per cent of the stakeholders of the Indian infrastructure ecosystem are implementing BIM. While more than 50 per cent of them are aware of BIM as an extension to CAD.
This points to a huge gap between awareness and implementation. There’s a need to drastically enhance awareness and trigger implementation to plug the existing gap.
Most of the users are architects and designers who use it for design simulations, enhanced visualization, and better coordination and collaboration.
Another challenge is that most organizations that are aware of the benefits of BIM don’t consider implementing it due to lack of knowledge on ROI. There are also some stakeholders who are not aware of BIM and its value proposition across infrastructure projects.
Currently, BIM is being utilized in a range of subsectors across the built environment in India. Analysis suggests that there is a significant inclination towards BIM adoption particularly in residential, commercial, and mixed-use building construction, followed by airport terminals and facilities projects.
BIM maturity in Indian infrastructure projects is at a nascent stage. It is used mostly in the planning and designing phase which includes feasibility study, schematic design development and tendering and procurement documentation.
Furthermore, the level of BIM implementation is the lowest in the operations and maintenance stage. One of the major reasons for this is that the ROI of using BIM solutions across the building and operations and maintenance phase is still not realized.
This establishes a strong need to assess the qualitative and quantitative ROI of implementing BIM solutions across different phases of the construction and infrastructure lifecycle.
BIM adds multiple benefits to deliver construction projects throughout the project lifecycle, including supporting concurrent construction. It can also facilitate the development stages of a project lifecycle: from the early conceptual phase through the design, construction, and operation phase to demolition. The most important benefits of BIM implementation are enhancing productivity and increasing efficiency. BIM can integrate time and cost which supports real-time updates and assesses efficient tracking and monitoring processes along the project phases.
BIM can be applied in the assessment and analysis of green buildings. It can also be used for clashes detection and design optimization.
The ability to apply BIM in different construction-related management processes may lead to high performance in the Indian infrastructure sector.
Understanding and acknowledging the value of BIM will make construction players’ decision to use BIM for their projects very easy. However, to achieve that, it is important to identify and convince them about the benefits of the technology.
Quantitative ROI, the recently launched report on BIM’s Strategic Return on Investment (ROI) in Indian Infrastructure Projects, produced by Geospatial World in association with Autodesk, quantified the ROI of BIM adoption in Indian infrastructure projects.
To identify BIM’s strategic ROI, the study develops a comprehensive systemic review of mainstream case studies of BIM implementation in Indian infrastructure projects. A total of 84 projects have been taken into consideration from different sources including conference proceedings, company websites, journals, etc. They have been validated through one-on-one interviews to evaluate the true value proposition of BIM in infrastructure projects.
Based on the analysis of 30 successful use cases of Indian transport infrastructure projects, it can be estimated that an average of about 30-35 per cent of design time was saved.
BIM played an instrumental role in the optimization of the design and alignment of routes through early visualization.
In the construction stage, BIM enables real-time progress tracking and clash detection and helps speed up the construction work by an average of 45 days. Further, the successful adoption of BIM can save up to an average of 15-20 percent of the overall project cost.
Utility infrastructure projects including water supply, power and electricity generation, and oil and gas pipeline projects can save up to an average of 25 percent of the time during the design stage as BIM plays a pivotal role in facilitating the simplification of planning processes and promoting work linkage during the early stages.
With regards to the construction stage, BIM adoption helps in the efficient estimation of required resources and possesses the ability to reduce the project completion time by approximately 50 to 60 days. Added to that, about 20 percent of the overall project cost can be saved by using BIM throughout the project lifecycle.
In the case of building projects, BIM enables faster and smoother collaboration among multiple stakeholders associated with the planning and design stage of the project and can save an average of about 42 percent of the time during the design stage.
BIM helps in real-time clash detection in case of constructing complex MEP designs and can save as much as 60 days during the construction stage. On average, building projects can save up to 22 percent of the overall project cost.
By estimating ROI to assess BIM initiatives and implementation across Indian infrastructure projects, organizations associated with infrastructure development of the country can prioritize investments for organizational effectiveness. This leads to sustained business improvement and increases competency levels.
Proper ROI estimation will help chart out a roadmap for future development, with strategic recommendations for devising impactful optimization strategies and designing frameworks for sustainable infrastructure development.
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