Transcript: Digitizing Real Estate Assets Through BIM

Bringing all of these stakeholders to the table and having these discussions, it brings that awareness to the whole team and it's a matter of sorting through that and making decisions based on those discussions and meetings with the various stakeholders. The other stakeholders within the organization outside of design and construction are the ones who are looking to leverage BIM the most. So we're talking about marketing, leasing, procurement, facilities management, and even IT. Looking to use BIM for their own good to do things more efficiently. So when you're talking about leasing, to use BIM to form stickier relationships with their tenants.

If a tenant can better plan their space ahead of time, maybe pre-lease or while they're leasing the space and writing up all the agreements, if they can have a BIM delivered to them that helps them plan how they're going to utilize the space and when it comes time to renew that lease, the higher chance of success in renewing that. Same thing with procurement and facilities management. Compare a single BIM to various BIMs regionally, nationally, and internationally to try to determine metrics, analytics, see what they're doing right, see what they're doing wrong, see what assets are performing correctly, see what assets maybe they should weed out of their design specification to do things very data-driven in each of those stakeholder realms.

The goal here is to get all the stakeholders to buy in to this idea of BIM and how to use it within their organization. Hello and welcome to the Constructor Podcast, the future of the built environment. I'm your host, Brittany Campbell-Turner, and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand how to lower risk, be under budget, and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. Welcome to this episode of the Constructor Podcast.

Last week's episode was a replay of my interview with Peter Anchor-Sternie, second vice chair of IFMA board of directors and founder director of service marketing international IVS. He's also just started a new position at WeWork. Congrats, Peter. At the time of the interview, he was the chief marketing officer at ISS providing quality experiences for all of the 500,000 employees at ISS. He spoke about how ISS was adopting the vested approach, about the change that's happening in facilities management, and how it's affecting the focus on recruiting and retention.

Last but not least, we spoke about the importance of service management. So if you haven't listened to that episode yet, check it out at constructor.com slash Peter A. Before I share about what this episode is going to cover, I wanted to make a quick announcement. I will be podcasting at the Lean In Design Forum in Chicago, taking place on the 29th and 30th of this month. I will be asking attendees how much focusing on virtual design and construction and BIM really supports their communication and collaboration to enhance their Lean Design journey.

Cliff Mosier, the author of Architecture 3.0, the Disruptive Design Practice Handbook, will be the keynote speaker. You know I'm fascinated with the opportunity to disrupt. I'm also really looking forward to seeing some old friends from the Lean community. So if you haven't signed up to do so yet, go to leanconstruction.org slash events, look for 2019 in design forum, and register there. Now let me share with you who we're going to hear from today.

This week we're speaking with studio leads Jeff Hoffman and Kyle Hudson at Via Technic. We talk about the intersection of BIM and facilities management, also known as the digitizing of real estate. We talk about the importance of stakeholder engagement and how an initiative changes based on if it's a company-wide more top-down initiative from executives versus bottom-up approach and what good BIM looks like. Last but not least, we discuss how the return on investment can be understood better by owner-operators and how tracking of asset information can be improved by using BIM in real estate.

With that, let's get into the interview. So today we are speaking with Via Technic, both Jeff Hoffman and Kyle Hudson, studio leads. We're going to be talking about BIM for facility management and digitizing real estate. So with that, Jeff and Kyle, welcome to the Constructor Podcast. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for having us. Appreciate it. Yeah, so I'm going to kick it off here asking a little bit about your experiences and the first question is going to be directed to Jeff. This conversation around BIM and, you know, how is it used and what's the owner's perspective of utilizing BIM in the first place? I want to get Jeff your opinion on how BIM has been used in the traditional sense for owner-operators.

Could you share a little bit about your experience in regards to that? In the traditional sense, you know, BIM has not widely been used by a lot of owner-operators. You get a lot of owner-operators asking for BIMs at the end of a project, but not typically using them in any formal way or leveraging the power of BIM. And frankly, they just haven't had the skill set or resources to do that. Obviously, some of the more common things we've seen BIM utilized for is design review or clash coordination, et cetera, but that's been more on the design or construction phase of things.

So essentially, owners may not be seeing the value add from utilizing BIM unless they want it at the end of the project. They don't see it throughout the duration of the project, rather the value throughout the duration of the project. Is that what you have been saying? Yeah, I think for the most part, it's been used in silos, more or less. You know, the designers, the architects use it for their own reasons to produce their 2D documents, which traditionally goes out to bid to contractors.

And the contractors would usually start over with their own models in which they utilize for their clash coordination during construction. I think more recently, we're starting to see owners start to see some advantages that they could possibly get out of it. And that's where we have recently started to work with owners and implementing strategies for ways for them to get value out of the BIM process. And we're going to dig into that a bit. I had a discussion with fellow podcaster and also listening to his podcast, Bill Dubebik, the BIM Thoughts podcast.

We were talking about how there are a number of people who were at the Autodesk University conference. And they were talking about do owners know the benefit? Do they recognize it? Do they understand it? And there's the broad gamut, right?

There are some that do. And then, and it just so happens to be that you two have been having some really great success stories with those who know. But then there's the other side of the spectrum where they only think about it really an afterthought. So it appears to me that it's a real slow journey. There's a lot to learn from the owner-operator standpoint.

And really, it's getting people to understand how an internal business process and the operations within a facility can tie in with BIM. So let's talk a little bit about how stakeholder engagement plays a part in this journey. And I'm going to ask this question to both of you. And I guess we can go ahead and start with Kyle here. How does stakeholder engagement really play a part here?

I think it's huge, especially when you're talking about large-scale owners with multiple stakeholders within an organization. So if you're talking about an airport, you're not just talking about facilities management as the only stakeholder, the only entity that's going to get use out of BIM, right? The airport leases out space to restaurants and airlines and all that. So leasing is going to be a big stakeholder. And the guys on the design and construction side of the airport that are worried about procurement and building faster and building more efficiently.

And then you might have a marketing team at the airport that could extract information and get use out of the BIM. So first of all, when you're talking about stakeholders, it's identifying the stakeholders within the organization. And then it's going to each of them and really spending time with them and figuring out what makes them tick and how they're unique from each other. Some owners are going to be on top of this. They've heard about it.

Maybe they're already using BIM. And other stakeholders within the same organization might be a little bit behind. So you have to sort of treat them differently and perhaps even treat them as their own sort of independent entity when figuring out how they can best leverage BIM. If you try to treat them all the same way, it's going to make your standardization job easier, right? Creating a single BIM that's used by the airport, for instance.

But you might end up leaving a few stakeholders behind or not giving the stakeholders what they need. I think that's the first thing when you're talking about stakeholder engagement and figuring out how they can use BIM is treating them all with, I guess, an equal amount of due diligence and respect and trying to figure out what they need. It's interesting that you mentioned standardizing an approach to communicating with the stakeholders and that you have to really make it tailor-made so that they can understand what they're doing and how it fits in.

Jeff, could you share a little bit about your thoughts around stakeholder engagement and how that plays apart from your perspective? I know Kyle mentioned the airport, but you have a different point of view here. Yeah, I mean, you look at all the stakeholders involved in a potential capital project. It could be the design team, the constructor, it's the owner. And within the owner, there's different levels there.

Anything from the CEO to maybe one of the maintenance technicians. You know, what kind of information within the BIM is going to help that maintenance technician? They may be more concerned about replacing a belt on a fan, whereas maybe the CEO may be worried about overall costs that they are expending on their portfolio of buildings. So there's very different ways to look at it and different pieces of information that's important or less important to each stakeholder. I think the challenging part too is if you try to give every stakeholder what they want in a silo, you end up with a BIM standard or a BIM specification or a BIM protocol, wherever you want to call it, that's like ballooned and sort of out of control and may be really difficult for the designers, contractors, the BIM authors to actually deliver.

So at the same time where you need to treat every stakeholder different from bottom to top, like Jeff said, at the same time, you got to kind of reel them in and figure out what they can really get the most value out of without disrupting the entire cycle of BIM delivery. Yeah, that's such a great point that the both of you have been making here about the standardization and who needs to see what and how. Like you mentioned, it's difficult because it may balloon and make it difficult for those who are actually working on the model, but there's a teaching and a building of awareness that needs to take place and how do you guys hurdle that?

That's a really good point, Brittany, what you just mentioned. You know, bringing all of these stakeholders to the table and having these discussions, it brings that awareness to the whole team and it's a matter of sorting through that and making decisions based on those discussions and meetings with the various stakeholders. Yeah, a lot of it can be discussion-based. There's no reason to start like a BIM implementation effort at your computer, right? I know that might sound backwards, but I think BIM implementation efforts and really any sort of technology change or technology implementation should start at the people level.

Just having discussions, those discussions can start out informal and maybe, depending on the organization, can move towards formality and be like actual training on a particular topic, whether it's BDC or BIM or laser scanning or anything. You could move in that direction of sort of formalizing things, but I totally agree with Jeff. It can start being very conversational and sort of informing each stakeholder about what they can get out of BIM, what the opportunities are, where the value lies for them, and sort of training them up from there.

You have to personalize it at some level. You're not just a talking head, right, at the end of the day behind a screen. There's incorporated this idea of change management where obviously you're training at each level, formally or informally. Tell me your perspective on how the standard gets put in place. I think it's, Kyle, you were saying that it's great to have it sort of at the, for lack of a better word, a grassroots level, right?

Those who are doing the work versus the executive level just piping it down. But is there benefit to having maybe more leadership saying we want to use BIM and this is a standard that we want to put in place? You feel like it gets adopted well? No, for sure. Actually, in our experience, we've seen success both ways, from top driven and bottom driven initiatives, but it seems like it's less of a challenge and more often successful if it's top driven.

So a lot of the implementation, like you said, happens at the grassroots level. But if it's driven and pushed and supported by the top, that's where we see a lot of success. So change management, yeah, totally. It needs to be handled by the people that are impacted the most by the change. So if you're introducing BIM into an organization and you're focusing on facilities management, the guys who are going to be impacted the most are the folks managing the assets on the ground.

So that's where the change management needs to be having. But if they're being supported and said, hey, this is the way of the future, this is the way our company's going to be going, I'm allotting you X amount of time per month or per week to focus on this, that makes the change that much more feasible if they're being supported by the top. Yeah, I think that any initiative, there needs to be those change champions that really carry out the goal, the endeavor, and they need to be enabled to do that.

Thanks for your perspective here. Jeff, did you have a thought here? I agree with what Kyle said. The goal here is to get all the stakeholders to buy into this idea of BIM and how to use it within their organization. But the most successful implementations of this is typically been the corporate CEOs or COOs have bought into this and are spreading that to the rest of the company.

It's not somebody doing the day-to-day work saying, hey, this could be great, even though that's what you need to really get successful implementation. It's important to get that upper level buy-in to spread that and to make decisions saying we're going to proceed with this. So do you think companies that know about BIM already, like they use it in their own internal operations, maybe a manufacturing company or something like that would adopt the idea of utilizing BIM throughout an organization? Or do you think it's just simple awareness?

Maybe they've gone to a conference or gone to a talk and someone in an organization, whether it's top, middle, or lower level, they just hear it and they're on fire and they can run it through. Do you see that? We're seeing the successful implementations being top-driven, whether they hear about it from a competitor or a success of somebody outside their own sector and then they bring it to their organization or whether they go to a conference and hear about it there. The successful implementations being top-driven, but we're seeing implementation efforts from all over the board.

I can think of lots of subcontractors and smaller construction companies where BIM is being driven completely from the bottom and it seems to have a different momentum and a different pace when it's driven from the bottom. So like some of these larger healthcare airports, universities, where it's being driven from the middle or top, it just seems to go faster, smoother, and they start to get value faster. Somebody has to have that vision though, right? Oh, for sure. They have to be able to articulate that and that's why I asked, does it depend on the organization?

Do you see it lopsiding over to one industry versus another because of that? Yeah, when you talk about lopsiding, I think healthcare is the first thing I think of. If you look at healthcare in the United States right now, it seems like, I don't know what the percentage is, but maybe 70% of healthcare owners are leveraging BIM in some way after the construction project. That is super lopsided where BIM has just swept over healthcare, but then in other sectors, you're looking at the exact opposite statistics.

I'm not sure why healthcare airports and large entities like that, maybe they have a larger support system, maybe they have more money to burn. I'm not sure why that is, but we've definitely seen a sweep in healthcare in the United States. Deal with some of the healthcare projects. I mean, obviously they're more complicated projects as well. So you're dealing with more experienced and sophisticated contractors and architects on those projects.

And the owner recognizes that they need to take more innovative approaches in order to make sure the project gets designed and constructed correctly. So I think that's one aspect of that. As Kyle said, there's some sectors of the industry that still gets designed and built in a very old school way. Perhaps the architect is still drafting by hand or whatnot, and the contractor is just building it as they always have. By hand is just, it just pains me.

Just I can't perceive that. Oh my goodness. And I've encountered that myself and I'm like, you're going to put this in CAD, right? This is just conceptual, right? You do have some body that you can hire to put this in CAD so we can get some PDFs at a minimum, please, in 2D.

Oh man. But it's where we are. Obviously we talked about stakeholder engagement. It seems as if Kyle, you've had a really good experience with a particular client. I'm not sure if you can mention them or not specifically, but they are using BIM in an extraordinary way.

Could you share a little bit about your experiences? It's a large real estate owner. They have commercial tenants in their buildings worldwide, but what they're trying to do is pretty unique for the industry that they're in. So if this was a hospital, a lot of the things I'm going to say might not be super unique, but because they're a building owner and they rent their buildings out to tenants, they find themselves in a sector where they're sort of alone in what they're trying to do. They're looking to design and construct better.

That's sort of the normal BIM application. They understand that. They're even looking at kit of parts and sort of doing things modularly. But the other stakeholders within the organization outside of design and construction are the ones who are looking to leverage BIM the most. So we're talking about marketing, leasing, procurement, facilities management, and even IT.

Looking to use BIM for their own good to do things more efficiently. So when you're talking about leasing, they're looking to use BIM to form stickier relationships with their tenants. If a tenant can better plan their space ahead of time, maybe pre-lease or while they're leasing the space and writing up all the agreements, if they can have a BIM delivered to them that helps them plan how they're going to utilize the space, this owner thinks that's forming a stickier relationship. And when it comes time to renew that lease, they have a higher chance of success in renewing that.

Same thing with procurement and facilities management. This owner wants to use the BIM and compare a single BIM to various BIMs regionally, nationally, and internationally to try to determine metrics, analytics, see what they're doing right, see what they're doing wrong, see what assets are performing correctly, see what assets maybe they should weed out of their design specification. So they're looking to do things very data-driven in each of those stakeholder realms. Well, it's funny you mentioned the using the BIM to make the relationship with the lesser stickier.

When I was going through closing process here for my condo, I took the floor plan they have and I started laying stuff out in my house. If you can do that in a BIM model, especially if you have the expertise in house and say, this is how we want to set up our poly lines, simply just to lay out like workstations or whatever it is. Those types of things are huge just so that you can get ahead of that planning process. And absolutely, weeding out the properties from the larger portfolio.

I know there are a lot of companies who want to take this information and pull it into their IWMS systems. I mean, even getting bigger and greater because they're trying to tie that into their sensor technology as well. That they can understand how well the space is being utilized and they tied that into their BAS system so that they can identify, should we be heating or cooling this side of the building this time of year because of the way it's being occupied? I mean, it opens up doors for so many things.

Are you seeing that? For sure. So this company in particular that I'm talking about is now considering them as the backbone to a lot of things that you just mentioned. So for IoT, for instance, they're trying to figure out, are our tenants using the space in which it was designed or are they just sort of adapting to the space that we've provided them? If they're adapting, then that means the next building that we design can be designed to better suit a particular tenant.

Or if they're using the space exactly as we anticipated, should we be charging more rent? Are they more happy than we thought they'd be? Something like that. So IoT is starting to play a pretty big role in spatial analysis, obviously energy analysis, IoT at the metering level, if you have multiple tenants. And feeding that all back into a BIM where you can visualize the data is becoming huge, not only at this company that I'm talking about, but also at some of the larger agencies nationally, such as airports and government agencies are starting to look at IoT as a way of getting insights into their facilities as well.

Yeah. Well, and Jeff, I think it was you who mentioned a little bit earlier about better cost analysis. Could you share with us a little bit what your thoughts are around cost component? And then in addition to that, other examples of what you think utilizing them in fusion look like? Well, this kind of picks up where Kyle left off in a way.

But with IoT, you start to get the ability and what you start hearing more about now is predictive maintenance. To be able to predict when pieces of equipment or certain assets may not be operating at optimal efficiency, or possibly predict when it may fail. There's a lot of things there. There's a huge potential for owner savings when it comes to cost. Whether it's better planning for replacement of certain assets, or just better maintenance and operations procedures in terms of making sure the equipment is in tip top shape and making sure that it's running efficiently.

We've also seen cost control on the procurement side. I think I kind of briefly mentioned it earlier. But some of our clients who are large owners, multiple buildings going out per year, are starting to look at their supply chain of architects, engineers, GCs, subcontractors, and then finally, manufacturers and providers at the bottom. They're starting to look at BIM as a way of getting insight to the very, very bottom. The people who are supplying the parts, pieces, and raw materials that are going into their building, and they're starting to say, okay, if I look at a certain number of BIM models that represent my portfolio, can I start to spec out some of the materials or parts or assets that I want in my building instead of leaving it up to the GC, who leaves it up to the sub?

The sub leaves it up to the availability within the local market. The availability is just a complete question mark. If you're on cost control and life cycle awareness and all of that, you can use BIM to kind of gain insight and make decisions within your supply chain if you're an owner. Yeah, that's such a great point here. I know, Jeff, you mentioned to me earlier about some of the maintenance that you're working with universities on.

And it's specific to what you're talking about, Kyle. It's collecting that asset data sort of after the fact, but to your point, it certainly can help with that life cycle. Did we pick the right thing? Did the GC pick the right thing? Did the architect or engineer spec the right thing out, right?

What are you seeing, Jeff, as to how the asset tracking goes? Well, we're seeing a lot. And I was just going to jump back to your comment there and what Kyle finished in regards to some of the asset data and what's an example of a good BIM. What does it look like? Really what it looks like is a well-defined set of requirements from the owner.

That spells out both what data they would like to get from this process and that it's well-structured data, both graphical and non-graphical. And that starts to inform instead of collecting the data after the fact, let's collect the data as it's being created. You know, as the architect is making a decision in the design of a building and utilizing those spelled out owner requirements or standards as a guide for that design team. And same thing within construction, you know, as work is being installed or as equipment is being installed and tested, collecting that data at that point in time to include in this BIM for owner turnover.

So this data is available and ready when the construction is complete. We talked a little bit about tagging like hyperlinks to the O&M manuals. How does that work? So, I mean, a couple of the examples that had a few university projects where we've created a BIM for facilities management. These BIMs have been more of a complementary to the university's existing FM systems.

So basically on a couple of these, we've taken the construction BIM that the contractors utilize to coordinate the project, run clash detection and whatnot on. And we've gone through and collected certain pieces of asset data that the owner had wanted to collect on identified pieces of equipment or certain assets. You know, in some cases it might be manufacturer model number, warranty information, et cetera. That's information that we embedded within the model object from the construction BIM. And then also linking operations and maintenance documents to that model object as well.

I'm going to take a quick break here to make a very important announcement. Death to value engineering. I'm on the quest. I wonder if it's truly possible to get rid of this whole concept called value engineering. Now, if you're wondering that too, I wanted to make this quick announcement.

The 2019 Lean In Design Forum might just be the right place to learn how upfront lean design planning can streamline design coordination and help the design to be more constructible. It might just get rid of this value engineering process too. The event takes place on May 29th and 30th and I will be there podcasting at a booth. You can find out more at leanconstruction.org slash events, go to Lean In Design Forum and register there. With that, let's get back to the interview.

I'm curious as to, you know, sort of the next level of technology integration as well. I mean, are we at the point that you guys are seeing VR being used in a facility to then check out what the operations manual saying about a particular equipment when you're looking at it, right? Like, is that happening now? I've seen some instances where it's being played around with. It's virtual reality or augmented reality.

We have a couple of examples of embedding asset data within that virtual reality environment. I haven't seen it implemented at a large scale and I think part of the reason is when you're talking about AR, so augmented reality, the hardware generally is seen as not quite ready yet. For instance, Microsoft just released HoloLens 2. HoloLens 1 was never really meant for wide release, you know, wide scale adoption within the construction industry. Maybe HoloLens 2 is sort of taking that next step.

It's a little too early and as far as all the other AR hardware out there, I think you would say that they're lagging even behind HoloLens 1. So, when you're talking about augmented reality, like a mechanical technician in the field looking at the piece of equipment and looking at data augmented on top of that piece of equipment, I really do think you're looking at a hardware constraint that's probably going to go away and not be an issue within a few years. So, AR adoption for facilities managers could take off, you know, as soon as potentially if the market decides that HoloLens 2 is what it wants.

Now, when you're talking about VR, which is like fully immersive virtual reality, that we've seen pretty widespread adoption on the leasing, marketing, visual architecture, space planning side, but very little adoption on the facilities management side because you're fully immersed. You're sitting in an office rather than right next to that piece of equipment. So, that's kind of a key difference between VR and AR when you're looking at facilities management is, does it even make sense for somebody to be fully immersed, perhaps in a training environment? So, if you're learning how to run a boiler, for instance, maybe you're in a two-week course on how to run a specific boiler at a hospital, sure, maybe you want to get immersed for a few hours a day and fully run that boiler, but on a day-to-day level, you're not going to run that boiler in VR.

You're going to be next to that boiler running it, AR. So, we're not really seeing VR AR on the FM side, wide-scale adoption right now. Okay. Now, that's good to know where we are in some of the opportunities here. I see your point about AR being more palatable down the road when the technology can support it.

Yeah, specifically for FM, I think so. I kind of get nerdy about the opportunities that may come and it's sort of a shame that we're just piloting it now, but I guess we kind of, we have to take steps, the baby steps here with technology. So, let's talk a little bit about this good old thing called a BIM execution plan. I know you guys are using it. What does it look like?

Are owners writing their own or are you recommending them? Tell me a little bit about how it's working out. You know, some of the larger owners, and this goes to health care, higher ed, government organizations, and airports, you know, those are typically the owners that you see with BIM execution plans. And typically, they're going to be tailored to meet their goals and objectives on a project and to make sure that they're getting the deliverables they need for a successful project on their end. We are seeing more and more owners asking about this.

BIM execution plans are definitely a part of every project that we work on. If the project is related to BIM at all, I mean, we always have a BIM execution plan. And it's something that we're always recommending, whether it's working with architects, contractors, or owners, it's just part of the process that makes it go a lot smoother. It defines those deliverables and, you know, what those deliverables should be. So, yes, we are seeing more and more owners requesting this and asking about BIM execution plans.

We think it's a very important part of the project and should be a part of every project and every phase. You know, there's going to be a separate portion of that plan that relates to design, another portion that relates to construction, and then you'd have a portion of that BIM execution plan that also relates to operations. And it all, ideally, it is all connected and should flow from one phase of a project to the next with a common defined data structure and deliverables set throughout it that makes a successful project in the end.

And it kind of goes back to that stakeholder engagement question that I asked earlier. Obviously, the operations component needs to come into play, but does that happen first or is that last? In my experience, the stakeholder engagement and defining those requirements has to come first. It's not always the case. In fact, I probably see more projects where it's already been designed and maybe it's starting construction and the owner is asking, oh, what kind of information can I get out of this that's useful?

And it's, you know, I've worked on many projects where that's the case and we ramped up to get it included, but ideally, you always want to try to get that information defined first. Use it when you're hiring an architect. Use it when you're hiring a contractor. It's important to have those standards and requirements in front end of a project manual so all of the parties involved in bidding on the project know what those requirements are and know the goals and objectives that the owner is trying to meet.

I think for years, it was the construction company creates the BIM execution plan. And then for a little while, I think we saw designers creating the BIM execution plan a little bit earlier. So during design phase, they would create the BIM execution plan. So that's great. It's shifting the BIM execution plan one step earlier in the construction process.

And now I think finally, we're starting to see large owners, not all owners, but owners in the sectors that we talked about earlier, shifting the BIM execution plan even another step earlier before the design is even awarded. The owner just has a BIM execution plan already prepared. At least they have a BIM execution standard to where when a new project comes up, a plan can quickly be turned out. So shifting that BXP from construction stage to design stage finally to owner, I think has been a real kind of shift in the US BIM implementation market.

And I think it's been really important because it gives owners the opportunity to leverage the BIM and get something out of it. There's no reason that the guy at the top of the food chain should get the least out of any process, whether it's BDC or something else. You would think that the guy at the top of the food chain would be getting the most, but for years that really wasn't the case. And we're starting to see owners force the cards a little bit by already having these BIM standards and BIM execution plan ready to go when the project starts.

At the top of the food chain, and they're investing the dollars into making sure that all of the services provided by the designer and the contractor meet their requirements. How do they know? If you have really good internal partners or CMs, you can validate that. But at the same time, it's really tough to know what an ROI is. I mean, I know I've worked with some clients where they say they don't want to use BIM because they don't see the value in it.

They don't want to pay extra. And they're saying, well, is the designer more efficient? Will they be able to give us our design faster if they use BIM? Why? It's not important to me.

And then there's obviously the other side of the spectrum where they're like, it just makes sense. Just let's use it. It's more efficient for everyone. And we can utilize it at the end of the project. But there's still the pushback, which is crazy.

So I mean, how do you articulate ROI? It is really hard. Yeah. To be better understood by owners, it's difficult. I mean, what have you come up with?

Because I'm working on my own statement. I want to hear from you guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. I mean, a lot of people are trying.

Years ago, I think Mortenson wrote a white paper comparing two very similar hospitals that they built. And that was like the first large scale effort at quantifying BIM ROI. And there's probably only been one or two efforts since then, I think, because it is a really hard thing to do. But I think if you start to talk their language, so start talking KPIs, right? Like large owners that run businesses, know KPIs and infuse KPIs throughout their organization outside of design and construction.

So in their day to day business. So if you start identifying key performance areas of where the BIM helps us do this particular specific thing better on this particular project, then that's like a plus one, right? We get a point for that or whatever. And if you do that throughout the organization for every stakeholder, not just designing construction. So if there's a marketing effort, if a BIM helps sell one more lease, and that can be a qualitative fact, right?

If a tenant says, hey, I really enjoyed getting that BIM early from you guys, because it helped me plan that space. Well, then that's a plus one. That means the tenant identified the BIM as being a part of their decision to lease the space. So that KPI has been fulfilled. Something like that.

If you start to get these metrics in place, then you can track them throughout the year, attract them throughout the project, and try to prove to the owner that it's working. But unless you're given that opportunity, that's a hard thing to do, because no owner is the same. It's not like I can take a really successful BIM limitation from a hospital and try to go, say, look, airport, you guys can do this too. They're just not going to believe it. So it's almost like a chicken and the egg thing.

You have to be given the opportunity to prove yourself, be those KPIs, before you can prove its value. Sometimes it's just demonstrating the value of it to them. When I say that, what I mean is we have one project here in the Chicago land area where we've utilized many different VEC services to get the design and construction of this existing space, this renovation of an existing space, to work out for the owner. It all started out with documenting the existing conditions with point cloud scan and then converting that to BIM.

Taking the design from a 2D to a 3D environment, seeing how it worked out with those existing conditions. We utilized VR to have the end user, the owner, do a design review. Lots of important pieces of equipment that needed to sit within the space in a way that worked out well. So, I mean, virtual reality played a big role in letting the users jump into that environment to provide feedback on the design and layout of that space. So they immediately, just by that hands-on experience, recognized the value that convinced them that it was well worth it.

That's a good point because it's not like we were called up one day and asked to do all those things. It's more like we stepped our way through the VDC process and looked for the next area where the owner could get value. It started with traditional laser scan, build a model from it. We had the opportunity to then walk away, but instead we sat down with the owner and the GC and said, is there another opportunity to leverage BIM or VDC or technology to get value for the owner?

Then one thing leads to another. So I guess that's another approach too, is talking to the owner and saying, hey, let's start small and see where it goes. Because if you start small, your investment don't really have to worry too much about ROI. You're not asking for this massive investment. But if one thing leads to another and you start to see value in all these different directions, then the ROI just builds on itself.

Depending on what side of the business you're in, we want our end users to engage and be enabled to review and provide feedback and or the decision-makers to feel the space spatially. Correct me if you have already mentioned it around BIM that I'm really interested in, given my research in blockchain and the like is possibly using BIM as a visual and accurate common data environment so that you can know that this is exactly what you're calling out from an asset perspective, both current existing facility and for better planning.

We talked about this already, but from an ROI perspective, what do you think the angles are in demonstrating to an owner operator and saying, hey, you have this information and it's accurate, it's better for you? So you mentioned the common data environment there. And a centralized common data environment will provide that database. I mean, essentially that's what it is that if set up correctly, the owner can contribute to the designers can contribute to the constructor can contribute to each team member can validate the information, whether it's correct or not, or whether it's been interpreted correctly.

So that idea of that centralized common data environment can be a pretty powerful tool set up correctly. Maybe even like leaving the modeling aspect aside because that sort of tends to draw on the imagination and sort of the 3D aspect of BIM and all that's good and has its use cases. But the common data environment, the I and BIM is really where owners in particular are going to get a lot of the value. So maybe if you start the conversations with I am your data consultant, or if I'm a GC, I am your data provider, or if I'm an architect, I'm like your data aggregator.

Forget about BIM. There will be a model associated with your data. But at the end of the day, if I'm your architect, I'm your data aggregator, and I'm going to give you this amazing package of data that you've never seen before in any of your other buildings. And by the way, it's going to be linked and associated with a 3D model. That's a way that I've had success in having conversations with owners who are sort of interested in BIM, but don't really see the value.

Just focusing on the common data environment is a way to sort of initially break down that barrier. It's a good call. So I like where your head's at there, Brittany. Yeah, you know, I'm getting fired up about this. It's exciting to me.

I actually just read a blog post on, what was it? I don't know, somewhere on like the next wave of BIM will be a data-centric BIM. Essentially, data will be the core of the BIM, and then everything else around that will just be like super-fluss-like things. That's like a different way of thinking about them than I think that we've been taught and trained to do. The UK-focused BIM, they call it Building Information Management.

So it is focused on data. As I understand it, all public projects have to use this too, right? So I think you're right on the money. I think there are organizations, governments that understand that the information is what's valuable and tracking the approval of it, really understanding what you have and how you can use it, and even the value of that asset within the facility. What's the resale of a property?

How do you take that information and really get the true value out of it? That's the kind of thing that really gets me excited. For sure, UK is ahead of us in that realm, but here in the States, NAVFAC and Army Corps, for a long time, have had these standards that focus on data and focus on COBE. So if you're a designer or you're a contractor, you have to give them a COBE spreadsheet. I think we've fallen a little bit short on implementation of those government NAVFAC and Army Corps standards, but the idea has been there for years.

I think NAVFAC came out with that standard in 2012 or something, saying, hey, fill out the spreadsheet for me. That's a pretty powerful thing that they're getting. Again, I'm not sure they're 100% there on implementation and extracting value from that data, but other owners, I think, need to look at the ways of UK and Army Corps and start to say, well, if they're getting all this data, if they're trying to leverage the data, then maybe I should be too. It kind of circles back to where it started with stakeholders.

I mean, you see so many projects now where the owners will request COBE, but they don't expand on that any further just because there's not a full understanding of what exactly is and what the main goals and intentions are by utilizing or requesting COBE. It goes back to that really understanding as an owner operator what the main goals and objectives you want out of collecting this data. You started to hear owners talk COBE light. Have you heard people say that, Brittany? No, I haven't.

We started to hear it because like Jeff said, COBE is a little bit too much for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. How am I going to use COBE? Why do I have to fill out all these tabs? Why are there 500 tabs in a single Excel sheet? We've started to hear owners say, I want something like COBE.

Let's call it COBE light. Then that starts the discussion of, well, here's what I want. Here's what my facility manager wants. Here's what my marketing guy wants. That starts the stakeholder engagement.

That starts the FM turnover process. It really starts to inform the architect, engineer, and contractor of what exactly should be in the model. It doesn't need to be full on COBE certified, but it needs to be X, Y, and Z. I think that's a really good conversation that you could start to have with owners too, if you're looking to get the ball rolling. I wanted to ask, did you guys have anything else that you wanted to add to the discussion?

I asked a lot of questions, but did I miss anything? I think we mentioned a couple. You mentioned the UK PASS standard. If somebody is looking for other verified standards, for instance, PASS went through committees and all this formal government approval. In a sense, it's been verified and put to the test.

Some others in the states that you could look into is Penn State, Ohio State. They both have a lot of research and they both have published BIM execution plans and BIM standards that they themselves use on their own campus. That's an opportunity for owners to start to say, what are they doing that I like? What are they doing that I want to do differently? And then on the airport side, Denver Airport, SFO, Massport all have BIM standards as well.

If you're running a facility that is similar to an airport, you could go there. And then on the healthcare side, I think it's a little bit more private. You can't just Google a lot of these BIM standards. The VA actually has some really good standards out there. They've implemented some good guidelines and put some stuff out there that's useful.

And we mentioned NAFAC and Army Corps as well. So I mean, there are a lot of standards. Some are a little overdone, I think, and others are very sort of to the point and fit that organization specifically. You can get a lot of good stuff out of all of these. That's good stuff.

And we had Kimana Numa on here talking about VA and BIM Storm and how some of the standards have come out of doing a BIM Storm. So I'll put a link in the show notes to that podcast. Thanks for all the suggestions here. I think those are great resources. And if you have any links, please shoot them my way so I can include them in the show notes.

Well, with that, I'd like to thank the both of you. This has been a fun discussion. I wanted to give them the opportunity for you to share where we can learn more about the two of you and Viatechnic. Sure. We have a website, Viatechnic.com.

And then there's a blog where we try to post sort of like monthly interesting articles. It's www.viatechnic.com and then I think probably the best way of finding me or Jeff would be LinkedIn. LinkedIn would be the best. And as Kyle mentioned, the blog or the website. Sweet.

Well, with that, thank you both. Thanks, Brittany. It's awesome. Yeah. All right.

Thank you. If you liked this episode, find out more in the show notes at constructor.com slash Viatechnic. That's V-I-A-T-E-C-H-N-I-K. If you learned something valuable in this episode, share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also let me know if you enjoyed our discussion by connecting with me on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn.

You can also email me at Brittany at constructor.com. That's B-R-I-T-T-A-N-I-E at construct double R.com. Next week, you'll be hearing me speak with a colleague of mine based in the UK at Mace. Her name is Marcia Bulpagni and she is a BIM management consultant. We had a good conversation on what BIM is looking like today from a global perspective.

We talk about compliance within public regulations and a focus on client specifications. We talk about how the BIM community is working to figure out how to maximize BIM level two requirements by past 1192 and how we're actually transitioning to ISO 19650, a new standard that is coming about in the UK. Okay, last but not least, we talk about what good BIM looks like and some really awesome resources that Marcia has contributed to in the world of BIM. I look forward to sharing this episode with you next week.

Don't forget, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, do so at your favorite podcast player. I look forward to continuing the constructor journey with you next week. you