Business
Expert Lists Gains Of BIM
A practitioner in the
building sector, and quantity surveyor, Okechukwu Ezeokoli, has said that the adoption of Building Information Model (BIM) in a project has redefined traditional professional boundaries in construction.
He said that for the Quantity Surveying Profession, BIM has the potential to automate measurements and facilitate the operation of accurate quantity take-off, which will reduce the time and cost required to estimate projects.
Ezeeokoli, who made this known at a public forum in Port Harcourt noted also that the housing sector is yet to fully utilise the BIM for estimating projects as at now.
According to him, BIM software is compatible with estimating software such as innovaya composer, which converts BIM files, making them compatible with Timberline’s estimate and quantity data.
“According to Gee (2010) BIM’s capabilities of automating the production of bills of quantities, which is one of the Quantity Surveying fundamental tasks will have both positive and negative effect on the Quantity surveying profession.
“BIM helps to eliminate time consuming process of manual quantity take-off duties of quantity surveying and some of its associated errors in respect to moving the data between files, risk of double counting, risk of missing elements and multiple 2D drawing themselves, are likely to contain many errors compounding the problem further,” he said.
Eze Okoli also maintained that the BIM tools provide an excellent opportunity for Quantity Surveyors to perform value management throughout design period, pointing out that the technology has tools capable of pperforming all the tasks of the traditional quantity surveying tasks from take off to cost control, value management and life cycle costing.
Corlins Walter