NBS National BIM Report 2017

Our seventh annual BIM Report is now available and may be downloaded for free at the location below:

- www.thenbs.com/knowledge/nbs-national-bim-report-2017

As always, it is a mix of analysis of the results of the survey and also a number of articles looking at BIM today.

The articles include the latest updates from key UK led initiatives into BIM that the rest of the world are looking to. These include features on the UK Government's Digital Built Britain programme from Mark Bew, the standards supporting UK BIM from BSI and how the UK are working with others across Europe as part of the EU BIM Task Group.

Fig 1 - How the UK is now pushing on with the ISO 19650 standards

Fig 2 - The concept diagram for public sector BIM strategy

As always, Adrian Malleson from NBS gives insight into the results of the survey. I have taken a few screen captures from it below to highlight one or two areas of interest.

The first chart below is interesting as it shows the opinions on where BIM will deliver against the main Government objectives. It can be seen that there is confidence on reducing cost and programme time. However, there is more sceptism around whether it will enable the industry to cut its environmental impact or have a positive impact on the industry's trade gap.

As this is the seventh survey, we can do view national trends over a number of years. The key question each year is around awareness of BIM. It can be seen below that this has been a reasonably steady upward trend since 2011.

Another question asked each year is around BIM maturity. This is asked once in terms of 'what level of BIM are you working to?' and then 'which standards do you use?'. Personally, I prefer the question around the standards as this gives better insight.

As expected, the 1192 standards are the most highly adopted. However, market adoption is still well short of 50% here. This suggests that although 62% of the industry may have 'adopted BIM' in terms of utilising 3D modelling tools and performing clash detection etc... we are still a long way from saying that the UK industry is working at 'level 2 BIM'.

The chart below is particularly interesting in that more than two thirds of the industry believe that 'clients don't understand the benefits of BIM'. I think this is a real opportunities for construction professionals to educate and support their clients.

The last chart to take a look at in this blog post is how construction professionals believe that emerging technologies will influence the industry. It's no surprise to see that big data and the cloud are leading the way in terms of having the biggest likely influence. Robotics on the construction site (or offsite) and machine learning have a little more sceptism attached.

Within the report we also take an opportunity to reflect on a case study of a project where all members of the project team are using NBS BIM solutions. Check this out in the video below or at our website:
- www.thenbs.com/case-studies/

Download your copy (and sign up for our newsletter) today:

- www.thenbs.com/knowledge/nbs-national-bim-report-2017