The airports that adopted BIM early shared the common elements of having a strong BIM champion and a vision of how BIM could contribute to meeting strategic and operational challenges. Larger airports have been leading the way on BIM implementation, expecting that it would improve their ability to rapidly and efficiently add new infrastructure and would enable them to meet projected growth demands. Large airports also saw BIM as a program that would improve communications and collaboration among their diverse group of airport stakeholders by breaking down the siloed data stores each group maintained to support its work processes.
Although ROI is difficult to measure precisely, the areas where airports can expect a positive ROI from BIM (see Section 4.5.4 in the Guidebook that you can download in this link) include :
- Maintenance costs avoided through improved maintenance planning.
- Uninterrupted operations through improved asset management.
- Labor productivity through improved planning, collaboration, and communication.
- Greater capital eficiency with shorter construction durations and improved management airport organizations that were early adopters of BIM are DEN, Massport, PANYNJ, and SFO. LAX and Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (SEA) are in the early stages of implementing BIM as a life cycle process and will begin the implementation phases in 2019–2020. LAX and SEA developed their preliminary business cases primarily on their experience with contractors on their capital projects who were using BIM. As it became clear that the architecture-engineering- construction (AEC) industry was rapidly adopting BIM, these airports thought they needed to understand BIM better to manage future projects. Also, they needed to understand BIM post- construction benefits. This section will explore building a business case for the use of BIM at an airport and will present options for measuring the effects of BIM on specific operations. This section will not provide a precise way of measuring the total organizational ROI from BIM, but will identify mechanisms for receiving feedback on how BIM is performing. An airport should not introduce
Copyright National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
BIM Beyond Design Guidebook
BIM with the expectation that it will produce immediate returns. The up-front investment and the time it will take an airport to adopt and integrate BIM processes into its day-to-day operations will likely take several years to recover.
Another option for airports building a business case for BIM is to include an investment in BIM as part of a larger business case for improving strategic facility asset management. This section will include a discussion of how BIM can support the adoption of a strategic facility ALCM approach such as in ACRP Research Report 172: Guidebook for Considering Life-Cycle Costs in Airport Asset Procurement (Fortin et al., 2017), the ANSI APPA 1000-1 – Total Cost of Ownership for Facilities Asset Management (TCO) – Part 1: Key Principles, and ISO 55000.
When evaluating the value of any business investment (whether in construction, capital investment, or an improvement to facility or business operations), the focus needs to be on the stakeholders and the intended outcome for those stakeholders. This focus means that the scope of the business case needs to include the impact on both current and future busi- ness processes. A common problem with many investments in technology-enabled improve- ments, such as BIM, is the failure to fully understand the business processes that will be affected. To avoid that misunderstanding, BIM’s primary benefits include the following:
- Improving access to and use of facility data through one single source of truth (a database)
- Providing visualization of how resources are being utilized and how investments might be prioritized to address demonstrated de ciencies by establishing relationships between financial and physical assets
- The additional depth of analysis offered by adding geographic attributes to facility data. Any financial analysis of the benefits of BIM needs to incorporate end-to-end business processes throughout a facility or organization to capture all potential returns.
You can download the complete Guidebook in this link : https://www.nap.edu/login.php?record_id=25840