Understanding BIM's Importance for Facilities Management

By Aleya Harris

This process, known as Building Information Modeling (or BIM) addresses the needs and priorities of facilities management in important ways. By leveraging the most up-to-date capabilities of contemporary information technology, BIM creates a dynamic, shareable digital model of a building’s physical characteristics, functions and integrated systems.

BIM offers important advantages for facilities management. Let’s take a look at what BIM can do for your facility, and importantly, how it can save you money.

BIM Creates Greater Communication

BIM allows architects, designers, and building managers to see, and plan out, construction and modifications. It’s allows this both before and after the building has been completed, creating opportunities for optimization and innovation at every point in the process.

Modern building construction involves a wide array of specialized trades and industries. BIM provides a centralized, uniform information-sharing platform. It makes it easier for everyone to communicate more effectively and work in more collaborative ways.

How Can BIM Help With Facilities Management?

BIM is an especially powerful tool for facility managers. It provides a greater degree of visibility into the building as a whole, and into how its various systems are laid out and functioning. Ideally, BIM will be integrated with “smart building” technology that provides real-time monitoring and data for these systems. It has the capability to be constantly updating the model, and to grant immediate visibility into issues as soon as they appear.  

By analyzing and addressing information provided by the model, facility managers can immediately take steps to address issues that affect security, energy efficiency, temperature; along with any other facet of the building’s function, safety, or comfort level.

Using BIM on a cloud-hosted platform gives contractors, owners, remote workers, and anyone else not on-site awareness and data about these issues, without requiring them to travel to the building location for a physical inspection.

How BIM Saves Money

BIM provides the most value for its users during construction, when various contractors are at work on the building. BIM helps realize the greatest potential savings by creating more opportunities for collaborating, eliminating redundancies and incompatibilities, and resolving problems faster.

As an added benefit, BIM can help organizations save money through the entire length of a building’s life. It does this by making it possible for management to identify problems earlier on, providing a way to plan out changes that takes all the building’s systems and components into account. This reduces the chance of making costly errors during the process of remodeling, and creates more opportunities to identify inefficiencies so they can be addressed.

BIM for the Win

It’s clear that BIM has a number of significant advantages that increase efficiency, ease communications, and save money. With its further incorporation into new, “smart building” construction, BIM promises to become a powerful, even essential, tool for a facilities management team.