What people don’t realise – I think, there’s a misconception in the Industry is that BIM and the 3D-world will eventually remove the need for cost managers because it will be automated.
Cost estimating as a task being a very small part of what a cost manager does, in a project life cycle automation in the future will remove a certain proportion of that task – cost estimating not the cost managements role because what we don’t talk about, a lot actually in the Industry is that the quality of 3D information develops during the design life cycle.
At the first stage you have very little to nothing.
Stage 2 you begin to have more information, more detail in the model.
But you cannot just use that information and calculate and estimate your design or your project or your proposals budget.
Because at that stage you probably only have 40-50% of design information.
So the cost manager – this is where they add value – while you have some design, you have a huge proportion that you need to estimate that’s not designed yet.
Likewise when we go to the detailed design stage, not one project in the world today has been designed in 3D 100%
And it wont be in the near future.
It will be eventually when we begin to standardize but at the moment it wont be.
So even though we say that BIM extract quantities from your 3D model gives you your bill of quantities (or your tilbudsliste in Denmark), it does not.
Because actually we only model 80% of the building parts or the building components that are necessary to price or necessary to budget.
That’s something very important because what we see is this huge drive towards 5D, and 5D BIM is automated real-time cost updating. But how can you do that if you don’t have a model that’s 100%.
What you end up having, is 5D automated real-time partial cost updating.
Do you think it is possible to have a detailed cost calculation with quantities and unit prices in the early design stages?
