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Unlock the secrets to revolutionizing your construction projects with Building Information Modeling (BIM) in our latest episode featuring Mark Oden, CEO of BIM Design. Dive deep into the world of BIM, likened to a highly accurate version of Minecraft, where Mark shares how this intelligent 3D model-based process enhances planning, design, construction, and management of building projects. From laser scanning technology to facilities management, Mark’s insights reveal the power of BIM in preventing litigation through effective communication and documentation.

Discover how high-quality BIM models and rigorous training of union journeymen can lead to successful project execution. Mark discusses a collaborative renovation of a training center in Arizona, showcasing the importance of precision and avoiding construction clashes. We also explore the core values driving BIM Design, including quality performance, trust, and community engagement. Learn how these principles have guided the company through financial challenges and expansion, even during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In our engaging conversation, Mark delves into the benefits of BIM, from reducing rework and controlling costs to shortening project lifecycles and enhancing collaboration. Real-world testimonials and case studies illustrate how proactive communication with subcontractors can lead to no-cost settlements and mitigate risks. Tune in to grasp how Building Information Modeling can transform your construction projects, improve safety, reduce defects, and ultimately save time and money.

Contact the Future Construct Podcast Produced by BIM Designs, Inc!

• BIM Designs, Inc.: minority-owned, US-based, union-signatory preconstruction technology firm, offering turnkey BIM modeling, laser scanning, coordination management, and other VDC solutions to the AEC industry.
• Schedule a free consultation: sales@bimdesigns.net.
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Chapters

• 0:22 Building Information Modeling
• 7:52 Building Information Modeling Explained in Depth
• 23:12 Core Values and Company Growth
• 32:13 Benefits of Building Information Modeling
• 39:35 Construction Risk Management With BIM
• 51:05 Effective Relationship Management in Construction

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:22

The CEO of BIM Design, and BIM is Building Information Modeling. It's an intelligent 3D model-based process that gives architects, engineering and construction professionals the insight and tools to more efficiently plan, design, construct and manage building and infrastructure. Mark, prior to being a design mark, had 10 years of experience working in Silicon Valley, in tech companies, in product management, business development, mergers and acquisitions, and in C-suite roles. Mark leads the growth strategy and execution of the company. His acute ability to develop and implement strategic processes that of the company. His acute ability to develop and implement strategic processes that scale the company capabilities drive efficiency services delivery increases client satisfaction, as we all know, causes claims that we don't.

Speaker 1: 1:11

and his cross-functional team I introduce to you Mark Oden.

Speaker 3: 1:24

Does this work for everyone, or would you like to use a microphone? Does this volume work? Yes, okay, let me know if that changes at any point. Thank you so much, linda, for the kind introduction and for inviting me here to this conference. I'm really truly honored, and I thank you to David, who will be hosting the panel. This is the panel for the next session, so thanks for that.

Speaker 3: 1:43

As Linda mentioned, this is a little bit about me. Well, first I wanted to tell you more about what we're going to talk about today. We're going to be talking about how BIM, or Building Information Modeling, can help prevent litigation. In order to explain that to you, I'm going to take on a little journey. A little bit about me, a little bit about what is building information modeling. If that's new to you, I'll explain that I have some ways to relate and several different ways to relate the concept to you, and then we'll talk about what has been designed what is my company and what's the history of my company and what services we offer together in terms of how we probably help prevent litigation.

Speaker 3: 2:22

How does building information model in the process in general help with litigation?

Speaker 3: 2:25

At the very end I have two case studies real-world case studies of where we situations we've encountered over the last few years on how we help avoid litigation through good communication and documentation. I just remember the very first conversation I had with Linda over a year ago. She mentioned the two major avoidances of litigation are communication and documentation. I've sung that from the mountaintops within my company for the year after that Great, great education that Linda offered me. So I really appreciate her so much for that.

Speaker 3: 2:58

So with that just a little bit about this. As Linda mentioned, I am the CEO of InDesigns. Prior to that, I had 10 years of experience in corporate America working for Cisco Systems, started my career as a network engineer, moved into product management, then moved into business development, mergers and acquisitions and strategy and planning. Business development was the final chapter of my time at Cisco. But I'd like to say that I don't have them on paper, but through working at Cisco I got the equivalent of three MBAs. It was a great company, worked hard and I learned a tremendous amount. Prior to Cisco, I went to the University of Florida and got my Master's of Electrical and Computer Science engineering degrees and several different minors in my undergrad. So that's a little bit about me.

Speaker 3: 3:48

Now I'd like to introduce what is building information modeling? Building information modeling, in essence, is the realization of what you want to build in physical space. So this room that we're in, this building that we're in, is a great building that should probably was modeled in three dimensions. So you're taking what you want to physically build and you're modeling that in three dimensions, almost like you're building a video game. But instead of building a video game or watching Avatar on a big screen, you're actually building a real world implementation down to an infinite accurate accuracy model to what you will build.

Speaker 3: 4:25

That's often called the pre-construction process. So the process of running that is either called BIM or the pre-construction process. It's an integrated structure, multidisciplinary data to produce the digital representation of the asset across the life cycle. The life cycle, again, is the shift from the planning to the construction and into operations. So you might also hear about facilities management. So facilities management can leverage the 3D model.

Speaker 3: 4:50

Late post-construction 10, 20, 30 years after construction they might have a breakdown, a systemic breakdown inside of the building and rather than tear apart the walls and figure out where the systems and parts are, they can look at the 3D models, superimpose that of what's physically there and then maybe only cut a section of the wall out rather than a whole big section of the wall out too, playing a lot less grind the needle in the haystack. So it enables virtual information to be shared by the design team. The design team is the architects, the engineers, the civil engineers, structural engineers, et cetera, the detailers and other key roles in the pre-construction process. They can share the information on that team amongst the main contractor, the subcontractor, the general contractor and the owner. And then, as I mentioned, the use of BIM goes beyond planning and design phase into the building lifecycle of maintenance of buildings, maintenance of the building.

Speaker 3: 5:45

So I know that was maybe a new concept for a lot of you. So just to raise your hands, who has kids who can relate to Minecraft? Maybe they've played it, maybe they have kids that have played Minecraft. So building information modeling is a lot like Minecraft. In Minecraft you're trying to build a potentially realistic implementation of the world in a 3D model. There's a little bit of an accuracy difference between Minecraft and building information modeling, but besides, that there's a lot of similarities.

Speaker 3: 6:20

bit of an accuracy difference between Minecraft and building information modeling, but just so I know there's a lot of similarities. Just a little side story that I thought I'd share with you this summer. Just two, three weeks ago I completed a summer's long road show around the country we're a nationwide company at this point. In each city I stopped for about a week or two weeks and stopped in cities all around the southern and midwest area of the country. I spent two weeks in South Carolina to meet with my head of project controls, ashley Calkins. She's 10 plus years working for Ford, which is one of the top general contractors in the country, and she came in and joined our leadership team.

Speaker 3: 6:58

I'm so honored to have that in a remote collaborative space that we work in. After not almost nine months of working together, this was the first time I was meeting her in person for the first time Because it was summer. She had her daughter and she had two nieces that were in town, I think from Wisconsin, that were visiting just for summer vacation and having a lot of fun with her daughter, and the three of them have been able to bond over the years because of Minecraft. So they all have their tablets, they all have their phones, they all have their ways of playing and collaborating together building Minecraft, and the nephew his name is Baba and I really were able to connect at a pretty deep level Throughout the whole two weeks I was there, all the kids were talking about Minecraft this and Minecraft that and things that would fill, things that would destroy and all the stories that came to it.

Speaker 3: 7:52

And one night after dinner Bubba pulled me aside and said I want to show you, I want to show you my craft. And he opens up his tablet and he goes into that world and the parents that maybe didn't relate to this would know what I'm talking about.

Speaker 3: 8:07

But he shows me in his game all of the different nooks and crannies, and crevices and secret hiding places and tops and bottoms and levers and just everything that kids spent hours concocting. In essence, bobo was the architect, he was the visionary, he was the engineer, he was the model in place, the design in place, and he was the detailer. He was the modeler. He had actually built the components to build that entire vision onto reality. I'm very touched by that story. I'm glad I get to share that with you. But that's just a maybe a through world relatable experience of building information. Along the ends, we as the detailers, we build all those books and crannies and premises and letters that would. We build out a virtual space, a 3D space that would be now surrounding us. It would be the space ceiling, space in between here, the attic space, the crawl space, all of that. So I hope that helps.

Speaker 3: 9:05

We also have a short video, two more video that is a fly-through of a building that explains visually, show you both the 3D representation of the building, so it will see that in different colors and you'll see black and white blocks which actually look a lot like Minecraft. And that's from a laser scan. I'll talk about laser scanning a little bit later in the presentation and laser scanning can help produce litigation. But imagine if I was going to change the space. This existing space would be called tenant improvement. So I was going to change the space. This is an existing space, which we call tenant improvements. I was going to construct something into this physical space. I would want to know where those fixtures are and how to avoid those fixtures in real time and down to high level accuracy.

Speaker 3: 9:54

So to help avoid clashes that may happen on a job site, I could take a piece of equipment that's called a laser scanner or a reality capture, and I can scan at a medium accuracy of 30 million laser scans. Think of it as a concept of sonar.

Speaker 1: 10:10

Like dolphins, they send an audio sound and it pings back and they know the distance.

Speaker 3: 10:16

So laser scanning is the same visual indicators and lasers and it does that across millions and millions and millions of points and then those points are all measurable to each other. So now I can take this wall and that wall and the distance between the two and I can take the space that we're in right now and scan it in a matter of 10 minutes or less, put that now into my virtual space and I can then design what will future be built in that to the accuracy of knowing where it is. So we partnered with a local union in Arizona, with the Joint Apprenticeship Training Center. They had recently bought a building that they called JATC building 9. They renovated that building.

Speaker 3: 10:51

They wanted to renovate that building and they asked us to say hey, here's an existing structure, can you scan it and you then improve that structure to allow our, our apprentices, our journeymen, to go in there and practice? You know, with piping practice, plumbing practice for service, so you'll see toilets and things in there. That why are there so many toilets in one area? That's because these are for service. So we'll just play that video and do the background here. So let's see if that looks like a good idea.

Speaker 3: 11:37

So from the outside, the gray area is the laser scan, the red area is the laser scan, the red area is the structural steel, the green is piping, plumbing and piping, and the red mechanical equipment that we're all being tested with and equipment pumps. So those are the example pumps that they might service. This is a second level story that they wanted to add that didn't exist before. It didn't look before. In the building, on a sub-level that second level they have toilets and sinks that are serviceable and you see the plumbing and the piping through the walls. So you just want to access all of that, whether in the draining process and we even show sub-floors in a moment it will navigate lower, it will show below the ground so you can see the piping also runs below the ground. So more surface areas and meters. If you look closely, there are a bunch of people's hollers there. Water heaters.

Speaker 3: 12:38

You can see. That's all. Plumbing is resisting equipment, every area is, and existing equipment Every area is existing mechanical equipment. That is very much a service that everything is used and then outside are very large water storage tanks to help offset service to the water storage. So this whole building is currently in progress of being built. Now it's being sent to the city and if we helped we could have effectively donated our time. I've loaded a box to hold this code and scan this model. So that's just. That's Minecraft, and React.

Speaker 3: 13:37

So I hope that was a reasonable explanation of building information, modeling and engaging. Enough, alright, so what? Are some of the pain points and solutions.

Speaker 3: 13:49

Why does the industry choose to use building information modeling? Or, more specifically, why would they want to use a company like Finansat, companies like BIM Design? So one is one pain point is poor quality BIM models for constructability issues and value engineering issues related to BIM modeling. So anybody can model a Minecraft. Can anybody model something that's down to an eighth of an inch accuracy? So that's the chasm that existed between the two In our company we've chosen to work with union trained journeymen and tradesmen.

Speaker 3: 14:26

To become a tradesman in a union, to become a journeyman you must go through a five year apprenticeship. The apprenticeship is five years of in-field work, so working in the field and then night school classes at night and passing certain classes and criteria and then eventually getting local licenses. Eventually they call it turning off and graduating into the journeyman. So by the time you become a journeyman you have touched the equipment, you've welded, you've cut the equipment, you've shifted, you've fitted, you've probably worked in the fab shop, you've done all sorts of different things to get to that point five years later. So you are effectively an expert at constructing.

Speaker 3: 15:05

What we do at FIM Designs is we hire the trained journeyman. They typically at that point already know, or people help them learn, the software, which is typically Autodesk or Autopad and Revit, and they will take what they've learned in the physical space and apply that in the virtual space. So a lot of times with companies outside of the design, you might not have a fully-constructed model because the person building that model isn't fully experienced in building the structure that you've been constructing. And then value engineering comes into play because as you're designing that, you can think about areas to save materials, save space, save vents, save anything and the more material you save on the job site, the more safe that job site is, because you're sending less material there and you're installing less.

Speaker 3: 15:58

So litigation and reducing risk is the less time you can spend on the job site the more safe. The job site is Another thing that we've been respecting for bailing wage regulations.

Speaker 3: 16:09

So if you think about federal work, like a fee day in hospitals or schools or other areas that would require prevailing wage on the job site. There's also public contracts that require auditing proof that you are respecting these prevailing wages. We have them designed to get more union Unions are always prevailing wage, so there's never an issue of working with a union provider because it's always been respected for prevailing wage. And then, absolutely predicting and predict and estimate BIM costs. A lot of times a package to do building information modeling will be put together at the beginning of a bigger. You know how do I build the entire building and BIM is a portion of that overall thing, that overall bid. So it might be a $10 million project and maybe a $500,000 to $1 million BIM project.

Speaker 3: 17:01

So at the beginning of the project clients are often licking their finger, putting their hand up, seeing which way the wind is blowing and saying I think it's gonna be a million dollars of BIM cost. But I actually wanna win this bid because they're taking the lowest cost bid, so I'm gonna make it $500,000. And we're gonna see if we can cut the VIM budget short so that we can win this project. So we can come in and say well, let's look at the 2D plans, let's look at what the architect wants, let's look at what the engineer wants and let's give you a bid that will be realistic and obtainable. Because if it's truly a million dollar project but I put $500,000 in my bid to win it, I'm going to have problems for the next, or the contractor that did that is going to have problems for the next three years because they're trying to fight to win that $500,000. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3: 18:05

Furthermore, some pain points would be dynamic demand so this is access to resources and consistent access to labor. So the labor construction we all know ebbs and flows. Oftentimes in the winter it ebbs. Election we all know ebbs and flows, often times in the winter the ebbs, electioneers, the ebbs that go through all of this. It's true. What clients want is an ability to access that labor at a very steady state. They invest a lot of money to hire and train individuals and then when those ebbs happen, they have to let those individuals go and they have training knowledge that goes to other companies. Once they're let go, companies that have been designed can provide to them access to the steady state flow of labor so it stabilizes their workforce. We utilize domestic workers Okay, I got sidetracked there, but dynamic bit of demand, not enough detailers.

Speaker 1: 18:59

We can also help them scale their teams when they don't have enough detailers on their staff.

Speaker 3: 19:03

Or maybe they don't have any detailers at all on their staff.

Speaker 3: 19:06

Maybe they have very aggressive schedules that they committed to and they're realizing that they're understaffed for those aggressive schedules. So we can help them meet that Lack of experience or poor communication with subs. For us, we focus on embracing technology, so I take all those 10 years that I worked at Cisco. Back in 2008, I was using one of those JetSense phones where you have a video phone and you pick up the handset, you dial the phone number and you see the person's video on it. That evolved into telepresence, which is these big screens of real world talking to each other, and that eventually evolved into WebEx and Zoom, where we are in today's world. So we try to embrace all of the tools that allow us for remote communication and collaboration.

Speaker 3: 19:48

We are effectively an entirely remote company, so it's impossible in today's day and world to bring all of the members of a pre-construction design team together in the same room at the same time to work on the same project, Especially in today's day and age. It just doesn't exist anymore. So we really pride ourselves in utilizing the newest and greatest technology to help create collaborative, cohesive teams, and we also provide education, training and consultation. Being the experts in the field, we can then expose that expertise out to our clients, whether that be the subcontractors, the general contractors, the engineers or the architects Also.

Speaker 3: 20:29

I want to thank Larry because he extended my brain today at lunch, realizing that we can actually be expert witnesses too when it comes to these types of claims, because we have the expertise to fly the model as we showed the video of that and realize where the constructability issues might be, realize what should have been done during that time that shouldn't have made it to the final product, for example. So we went that way. So that's a little bit about building information, modeling the pain points. I'd like to introduce us as a company. We were founded in 2016 in San Francisco. We just celebrated our five year anniversary. That's a milestone for any business and I'm very proud of that. I'm happy that we accomplished that. I took ownership of the company partial ownership in 2018, and I purchased the company outright in 2019. This year was the first year that we submitted ourselves for and we were nominated to the EAP 5000 fastest growing company list Of 5000 companies that submitted. Of many companies that submitted, 5000 made it to the list. We were number 148 in that submitted.

Speaker 2: 21:38

Many companies that submitted 5,000 made it to the list. We were number 148 in that list and number six I think five in Arizona.

Speaker 3: 21:44

Either number five in Arizona or number six in construction, or those are reversed. But those two metrics are there for the EAT 5000 list and we're also one of the only or one of the few combination certified minority owned businesses and union companies nationwide. So we have a few things going for us in our growth and I'll have a chart of that in a moment.

Speaker 3: 22:08

So, as I mentioned, we are experienced domestic engineers and tradesmen within an ever growing market for building information, modeling and pre-construction virtual design. In 2018, we had three employees operating in Los Angeles at the time of 2018. In 2019, we had at the end of that growth.

Speaker 3: 22:28

At the end of 2019, we had nearly 40 fully remote employees operating in 10 different states, across 17 different local unions and two offices with a headquarters in Phoenix, arizona, and we fast forward to today, which I reflect back on it like a blink of an eye going through it, maybe not so much at times. We're at nearly 70 employees in 22 states nationwide, with 20 union locals and two more offices added to New England, california and New York. We work on nearly 100 projects to date. As part of operating the company, I believe in eight different core values. These core values are very important to us.

Speaker 3: 23:12

I represent them every day. I work with my leadership team to represent them every day. Who works with the management team? Who works with individual contributors to institute our core values? Every single day? And every Monday we have an operations huddle where we meet with everybody on the operations team and we pick one of the core values Other than any topics. We always pick one core value to talk about that week as well. So other core values of quality performance as union tradesmen. The team takes pride in the work product that they produce and so important that it is high quality so that it can be constructed.

Speaker 3: 23:48

Trust and ethics we hold ourselves to the highest standards when it comes to trust and ethics. We must be transparent with ourselves and with clients and if an employee ever feels that they've been compromised, they're encouraged, they're trained, to bring that to management, which ultimately comes to me, and I work through managing any trust and ethics issues personally. We are solutions driven, which means we aim to solve the problem and speaking to the needs of the problem. So we work within our internal team and within our clients to speak to our needs so that the solution comes true.

Speaker 2: 24:24

We don't just operate in silos, we don't just accept what is we work together to try and solve the problem.

Speaker 3: 24:31

And innovation is a big one. It's a very big one for me, again, coming from the technology sector, I do consider them designs a very big one for me, again, coming from the technology sector, I do consider them a technology first construction company. So we're constantly looking at how do we introduce innovation and how do we better the overall environment for all companies. So I actually have a head of business development and innovation dedicated to how are we changing the world? Teamwork is another core value. So how do we all work together? How do we work through any barriers? Again, how do we address it or speak to our needs?

Speaker 3: 25:09

Community engagement we really focus on bettering our community, as I'm bettering our soul in the end. So we have a large focus on self-care and community care. In our company we have ownership of commitments, which is another core value. We're committed to helping each other solve their needs and we're committed to speaking to our needs and we're committed to owning true to our commitments. When I own true to my commitment, that either means I give you a date and time that I give you something and I deliver it by then, or before that date and time, I let you know what has come up that has blocked me from delivering true to that commitment. We know that when you're working with clients and many clients that go up to construction staff one commitment can lead to 10 different commitments per whole monthly dishwasher. So we're very, very careful in how we explain our commitments to our clients. And last but not least is diversity and inclusion.

Speaker 3: 26:01

Diversity and inclusion is of utmost importance to us, having no bias against gender, age, race, ethnicity or religion, and we believe it actually makes a stronger community, a stronger company by being as diverse as we can. Thank you for letting me share that One of the services that we offer as a company. So we offer design, build or plan spec pre-construction processes. Mepf is short for mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection. So we do that, build those trades, we specialize in those trades for building information, modeling. We are looking at expanding into architecture and engineering. So those are easy extensions for us now at this point and in the growth of our firm. But our core was MAPS. We can also do free construction consulting. So if you look at the general contractor, that fullltry construction phase we could in theory effectively run

Speaker 3: 26:59

that phase on behalf of the general contractor. And then laser scanning we chatted about and we shared the video on laser scanning as a service. So this is a growth chart. Over time it's split up. It's not evenly spread over months, but you'll see in 2016 and 2017. That was the original founder of Great Vision. It was a three-person, a two-person company up until I joined in 2018. In August of 2018, I was presented with the opportunity to take over a team of detailers that were moving Phoenix Arizona, so it was a bigger company. It was a construction company that did installations. They're Texas-based, they had an Arizona division and, for business reasons, they decided to shut down the Arizona division. So inside of that division.

Speaker 3: 27:46

They had a smaller team of 20 detailers which is what we do and they had a conference not much different than this conference, and they said we would love for our detailing team to go to a good home. So, rather than them all going to different companies, they invested their time and their effort building the team and we had that manager and that team go to a good home. It wasn't long after that I sold every single stock of mine to Two Houses that I had undergird to take on payroll for this company for this team and it was. I had nine weeks of payroll.

Speaker 3: 28:22

Six weeks in we had not secured enough business to maintain that team, so I went into the manager's office that became our VP of operations, has since left the AUU for a time. Our VP of operations and I said we have three weeks left and this whole experiment has given away my entire life's work and I'll have to start over. So what can we do? We were very fortunate to win a very large baseball stadium in Arlington, texas that carried us for the next nine months and that saved the company. So from there we continued to grow very rapidly very fortuitously into the beginning of COVID.

Speaker 3: 29:11

Prior to COVID, we were anticipating year-over-year growth of at least doubling year-over-year, if not more than that. We actually continued that growth into COVID because, once COVID struck, a lot of companies de-risked a lot of larger construction companies de-risked so they actually scaled down their teams, including their detailing teams, and they hired firms like us to take on that risk. So there was a growth spurt, but you'll see that dip in March 2021, where companies have figured out like, hey, it's been 18 months, it's been 16 months, this is not going anywhere. We need to figure out what our day-to-day operations are again. So they started to re-risk back up and we weren't pre-pick forecast that. We didn't predict it. So we had a dip, but we've since corrected from that and maintained our goal. So, as I mentioned, we're a nationwide company and we are union based, so we work with 25 different. We work with 25 different locals around the country. Those are locals that we hire out of. So those are locals that have the training centers that I spoke about earlier that go through that, train the apprentices for five years to turn in the tournament and they turn out detailers, and so those detailers work remotely all over the country through those different levels. These are some notable projects that we've worked on. We've worked on a number of commercial projects, primarily in the tech sector space, so, for example, there's Google Out that Place. We've also worked on YouTube and Facebook buildings, for example. We work across all industries and spectrums.

Speaker 3: 30:41

So this is a quote from a very dear friend, a very dear partner of ours, a business manager of local 469 in Arizona, aaron Butler. So he speaks to the value of why should entities want to work with union detailers? They go through 10,000 hours of training and they know their local city state construction codes to be able to interpret the plans and blueprints of all disciplines. They have the years of experience actually doing it in the field. So he reaffirms some of my statements I said earlier. We have a blog. We try to publish one a week, and so this was a quote that I had participated in and I had worked on this article Five Reasons why you Should Hire Human Detailers. Here's another nationwide map of US-based projects. You can see a large West Coast focus.

Speaker 1: 31:36

That is where we started in the West Coast, where we are shifting to take on projects nationwide.

Speaker 3: 31:42

You can see one dot there all the way to the east in New Jersey, so we're starting to pick up in the Midwest and East Coast. Definitely, building information modeling is a technology-driven process so that actually is adopted in the West a little bit faster than other areas of the country. That actually is adopted in the West a little bit faster than other areas of the country. Another quote that I want to share with you is from one of our clients. This is actually from a general contractor.

Speaker 3: 32:09

So we were at the time working for a sub and he was the general contractor managing the entire thin process, or the reconstruction process, and so he had mentioned that we have a G++ team on this project and we are collectively a well-oiled BBC machine Now he was the manager of this entire process of maybe a little biased he said biased or not probably the best group assembled that he has had the pleasure of working with and he thanks us and I thank him for the opportunity of working with them and the opportunity of receiving that wonderful faculty of working with them and the opportunity of receiving that wonderful faculty. So that's a lot of information about building. Sorry, that's a lot of information about their designs and I've introduced them. Now, why is the industry using them? How do we segue this into what your clients you know? Why is this interesting to them and why is this interesting to? You.

Speaker 3: 33:02

So building information modeling does many things, not just these six items here, but it avoids clashes between elements. So as I'm building in between the walls that I can't see here, I might not have enough space for the HVAC work and the plumbing and the pipe and the electrical and the pipe protection, the HVAC work and the plumbing and the piping and the electrical and the pipe protection. So as I conceptualize that as an architect, I might not see there's not enough space.

Speaker 3: 33:31

But even as an engineer I can say, hey, we want the occupancy of this to be so many hundreds of people, so I need this much water to run through the pipes. Well, if the pipes are so large, they take up space. If I put all that space together, I might find that there's actually a clash of equipment because of either space constraints or other system constraints, so you can actually visualize those clashes and that's often called coordination.

Speaker 3: 33:51

It's identifying those clashes and then working across all the different trades to coordinate, resolving those clashes. It allows you to capture reality accurately. So look at reality in a 3D sense, but in a perfect sense, and get a perfect presentation of the building. So imagine you had a $10 million budget and you were building this building that we're in today and you had a vision as the owner, as the developer, to build this building and you've got a lot of amazing things and maybe you were detailed enough to think about the exact picture, the exact when I walk into the guest room, I want it to be this type of sink, and then the building gets built and you walk in to that room, you physically walk into the room as you walk into the many hotel rooms, and you look as the owner, the person who invested a lot of money into this building, and said I don't like that sink. It would cost a lot, it would be doable, but it would cost a lot to take that sink out of all of the rooms and throw it away.

Speaker 3: 34:55

So imagine in today's world, where we live is we can model that and we can put on virtual reality headsets and we can walk through that building, having paid for the model but not paid for the construction. I can now say I don't like this. Or, as a doctor, I can say I don't think I'm going to get my journey around that corner and we need to think about you know the size of that besides that corner or any other any other implications that you can think of. If you can actually 3d conceptualize the model, it'll improve collaboration across your business. It forces all of those stakeholders to talk to each other. It forces them to think about what's going to happen on the site before the project even starts.

Speaker 3: 35:32

You can understand the sequence and the steps of the building process, bring that value over the years back when it comes to scheduling and you can visualize the elements of the building. So there was a. We have some sources here, some surveys that were done and a recent survey of BIM usage by construction professionals show that 89% of them have used BIM on some of their projects. That's a huge adoption of BIM in the construction space.

Speaker 3: 36:02

At least half of their projects are actively using BIM 47% say that and we're only seeing this trend continue to increase. We're also seeing ADC professionals say that. 76% of them say that it reduces rework. Reducing rework saves time, saves money and saves on potential litigation. 66% say that it improves budget and cost controls. If I stay within budget and I maintain and I control my cost, I'm also reducing litigation because I'm staying within the framework of the contract and 55% say that it shortens the project lifecycle time, which creates an opportunity to produce more, produce more work now and in the future.

Speaker 3: 36:49

And it's been proven that the return on investment increase with high-end engagement is 40% of that project. So if you look at that $10 million project and you had been to it, you could potentially save 40% on it. So if you look at that $10 million project and you add BIM to it, you could potentially save 40% on it. It would be $4 million. That's a huge chunk of change that you can save by thinking and conceptualizing everything like that. So some other benefits to using BIM would be visualizing actual building elements in 3D, eliminating costly mistakes during construction, replacing thousands of printed drawings so you can have something visually represented and overall, enhance construction safety management. I want to talk about that in practice. So I said earlier in the presentation, if you reduce the amount of hours, in the field you're reducing the number of accidents that could occur in your overall improving safety.

Speaker 3: 37:47

So the entire BIM you know BIM is not just for the 3D representation what we do is we create the IKEA set of instructions for construction and we take that IKEA instruction set and we hand it over to what's called prefabrication.

Speaker 3: 38:05

Prefabrication is a warehouse with shop tools that are in a physical space, not on the job site, that probably have half or less of the required people to buy the material in bulk, run it through machinery that cuts that piping down to size per spec of what we designed, with far less human involvement human engagement than if we were doing that on the job site with manual tools and again removes them from the site. So it moves a lot of the work that could otherwise happen on the job site to that pre-propercation stage. If you optimize and perfect that pre-propercation stage, then you ship it to the job site and you're simply and you can even pressure, test it and inspect it pre-installation. So you're passing inspection before you even got it to the job site. You ship it then to the job site and then you just in theory attached a few bolts and now you've got the whole assembly installed and you haven't spent eight hours or two weeks assembling out the job site. You've taken that all off the job site and you've been greasing and minimizing the risk of litigation.

Speaker 3: 39:14

So 75% of companies that have adopted them report a positive return on investment. I'd like to say that I'm sure that we can help the remaining 25% see that return on investment. So, talking about laser scanning, I had introduced that concept before. It's also known as reality capture. It's the same space, same name. It uses lasers to measure and create 3D space through the model and it's a growing segment of the construction due to efficiency, sophistication, portability of equipment and again, helps reduce overall potential litigation.

Speaker 3: 39:54

I actually have a case study that specifically talks about laser scanning. But again, imagine you're trying to make this physical space change but you didn't have a real world understanding of what was here and you shipped stuff to the job site and you went to install it and you said, oh shoot, that's in the way. We have to start from scratch. Well, there's a whole cost structure to that. Because of that, there's chain orders and somebody's got to pay for that change somewhere along the way. So if you can actually capture this in reality and then plan for what you're going to build, you're going to save a lot in that sense.

Speaker 3: 40:27

So laser scanning contractors receive tremendous value on both renovation and new projects, and it allows for modelers to all work on that and collaborate remotely together. Okay, so this is the fun part to all work on that and collaborate remotely together. Okay, so this is the fun part. How can BID help reduce litigation in construction? So a couple more data points.

Speaker 3: 40:54

Us Bureau of Labor Statistics rates the construction industry as the riskiest environment for work injuries and fatalities across all other industries. Construction tops them. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. In a sense I think it's a bad thing. So utilizing building information modeling, construction companies can enhance safety management through other ways that I've talked about. You can bring labor off the field but have that be a pre-found shop, pre-planned, pre-produced, all of that material before you install. You can produce again the Ikea instruction set of instructions. So you're centralizing the thought process of that design to an individual or group of individuals that all approve that design, rather than decentralize it to each individual job site and let those individual choices be made at that site. The more you can decentralize the thought model, the more you can de-risk that thought model Based on research we've done.

Speaker 3: 41:56

The top four reasons for construction litigation include construction defect claims, construction delay lawsuits, water, mold and built-in damage claims, and theme and breach of contract claims. So building information modeling can actually help with each one of these items. In terms of construction defect claims we can. In the design process, whether we have the engineer level or the detailer level, they can look for what is the specific design of that component all the way up to the manufacturer so they can make sure that that part that's going in is appropriate for that moment in time. So that should avoid future defects Construction delay lawsuits we saw earlier in the statistics that it improves.

Speaker 3: 42:41

I think it was 40 something percent. Said that it improved 44 percent, if I remember improved project schedules. So hopefully it actually adjusts the schedule for the better and avoids the lawsuits that good construction delays water and mold claims would come from good, good plumbing design and good plumbing installation good installation of the IKEA instruction set and then lean and contract breach claims would be reduced by keeping the cost down.

Speaker 3: 43:13

As we talked about, there's a cost reduction in the building information model and usability information model. There's also risks to construction and having a lack of a document strategy and documentation strategy. Having a lack of a documentation strategy allows for heavy rework or costly rework, lost productivity for hunting down documents, schedule overruns for blown budgets and disputes between contractors and clients and that difficulty in responding to litigation demands. The good news about building information modeling is that if you have this centralized team that's spread out around the country, it forces this concept of how do we collaborate, how do we document. So the BIP execution plan is the starting point for that. It lays out what's your digital footprint of this project and it forces building information modeling and it forces a healthy documentation strategy.

Speaker 3: 44:10

How do we work with GCs and A&E firms? We help visualize the ultimate vision of the architect and the engineer. We work directly with the owner, the GC and the CEL to interpret their vision down to an each of an interactor team. We also can lead coordination. I talked about coordination earlier in the pre-construction process for general contractors. We can work across multiple subs and run that entire process for all of the subs, or we can work for one side of the energy network collaboratively with the enterprise.

Speaker 3: 44:41

We can train major firms and receives on coordination, class detection, project management, new tools and software like Revit. We can run class reports for them, we can assign classes, we can educate on project management, fiscal responsibility and then run code refresher courses. And we're starting a training line of business with them. So here's a video. I just got a time indicator. Yeah, so if there's time for this, I'll share it, but effectively, this is our detailers at play.

Speaker 3: 45:17

So these are our guys that are on their computer detailing. Maybe it'll be at the end of my presentation just to kind of transition between one segment to another. So case study time is. I have two case studies. In this particular case study we were subcontracted by a subcontractor who was contracted by the general contractor.

Speaker 3: 45:45

The general contractor had an agreement with the subcontractor. Subcontractors scheduled commitments that they had to hit to the general contractor. Those are commitments that that subcontractor made without our involvement. That subcontractor came to us and said we would love to. We can't do this, so we need your help doing this. And we said okay, for the two things that you need, we can start on time for one of them, but for the other one you won't be able to start on time, or the time that you've dedicated you need to start on time. We can start on time X plus two, let's say so. We stated our what we could commit to very clearly to the client. The client said, okay, let's go, let's execute, let's do this Over time.

Speaker 3: 46:30

There was some confusion on the project because the general contractor had not been informed that there were certain delays along this path and they wouldn't inform that of what we could or could not get to. When we approached this with our subcontractor, the subcontractor did not want us having this conversation with the general contractor. They wanted to own that very confident, that they wanted to own that relationship with the general and they did not want us to communicate anything to the general. It put us into a very difficult position because we knew what commitments we could make, how we could deliver to the project, but we weren't being enabled to communicate those commitments beyond the client that we were funding.

Speaker 3: 47:06

Ultimately, what happened, obviously, is the construction project fell behind schedule and the general contractor wasn't getting the information they needed to understand the why. They were just seeing that it was running behind schedule. And in order to react to this or force that conversation forward, the general contractor back charged the subcontractor. There's delays, there's construction delays. That's one of the four reasons for litigation. And the sub went right back to us and said well, you guys are late, so we're going to back charge you. So again now we're in this kind of weird vortex of having told the client what we can do, but somehow we're getting back charged for delivering on what we actually could do. So our project manager went and collected all of the emails that I'd written the correspondent with, created a timeline and then showed both the sub and the general contractor exactly what happened and how it transpired. We ended up settling a no-cost settlement, just out-of-court settlement, to remove ourselves from that project. But it was a huge lesson to us to ensure that communication is documented and to set an achievable timeline in this documentation and to receive it as an alarm bell if your client doesn't want you talking to the general contractor to create a two-way communication path so

Speaker 3: 48:21

that's case study one with court litigation. Case study two is that this is the laser scanning case study I referenced. So in this case study we had a basement area, a subfloor area that had a lot of equipment mechanical equipment that already existed. That equipment had been laser scanned not by us, but as a relevant had been laser scanned at the beginning part of the project, and that should have been given and handed over to the detailer and carefully managed and coordinated while we designed for what we were going to modify and improve in that area. Our contract was simply time and materials, so let's provide an expert over to this project, and that expert would be managed by an overall project, not necessarily by us as a firm A very simple time and material basis project.

Speaker 3: 49:25

As this project unfolded, though, these laser scans and clashes were not heavily discussed in these normal coordination meetings that happen at the general contractor level. So we actually had been applying the laser scans. We just didn't catch everything and everything that should have been. That actually created some challenges. The electricians went in to try to install it and they said, hey, there's this existing stuff in the way and we're going to have to reroute it in the field. It's going to cost a lot of money and so we need to talk about who's paying for these costs, because this was clearly documented and physical here before.

Speaker 3: 50:00

As this escalation occurred and money was started you know, figures were started to point at who's going to pay what we noticed that our sub very similar to the last story had backed away, had leaned out of the conversation, had leaned out of the relationship with us, and we started to dig into where's the contractual obligation here. Number one this is time and material, so it needed to be managed at the level of us. Number one. Number two in the BIM execution plan that I referenced earlier, it clearly outlined that the general contractor was responsible for coordinating and coordinating laser scans and clashes. So it was their responsibility to make sure that clashes had been detected. Gc was not wanting to take that responsibility and the subcontractor was not wanting to push that responsibility onto the GC to protect the relationship between the sub and the GC.

Speaker 3: 50:49

So again it was a conversation of will dev designs ultimately pay for that because of this relationship that needed to be protected at the GC and the sub level. And I noticed the subcontractor leaving out and I spoke at many different levels up to the president of that subcontractor, and ultimately we had some in-depth conversations and we both got ourselves to lean back in and ultimately settled, based on the relationship, at a no cost settlement where we, even though contractually I think we would have won, we did want to avoid the cost of litigation and so we didn't pursue that and we just took both costs out of our straps, so all of our costs covered and moved on. And that's the relationship management side. And so a takeaway from this is look for the red flags and communication breakdowns. Maintain strong communication and partnership focus. Also, we learn to be proactive and draw upon resources like the brokers and legal community Companies and counsel and then document, how others react and put them on notice in a professional relationship and then relationship oriented manner.

Speaker 3: 52:02

So, even as our clients were leaving out, we had to lean into that relationship to help them feel safe and secure that we are still working with them towards the ultimate goal. And so, just to wrap it all up together, if you remember, on the first slide I let you know that I had educated me about the two most important things to avoid litigation. It's about documentation and communication. So you see both of those outlined here. It's a case study. I want to thank you all for so much for your time. Just as a summary, bim Designs helps visualize the architect's and the engineer's original vision and provides the visual representation to our clients for their review and feedback. We avoid critical field misses and change orders to achieve clarity on project installation and through building information modeling, each project is assisted in avoiding possible litigation due to lack of documentation, communication, planning and visibility, and I want to thank you all so much for your time. Thank you very much.