BIM Building Information Modeling 

It has been said that Estimators that work in BIM have a different function that those working in 2D… Working in a typical 2D design environment you physically measure areas, lines, and etc…, using for the most part the parts of the body below the shoulders… In BIM most of the measurement process is performed by the BIM software, so the estimating process requires using the parts of the body – above the shoulders. Traditional 2D / 3D CAD programs use raster / vector graphics (e.g.: geometrical primitives such as curves, lines and circles that have some associated data and replicates the human process of drawing on paper. The outcome is simply a graphical representation of the proposed design. In BIM, the design is made up of families of objects that contain design elements (that are termed “intelligent”) this is because the designers database defines the properties and parametric or behavioral relationships of the objects in the drawing which in turn defines how these parts interact with each other. Therefore, the design “models” are rich in information that can be extracted, quantified, analyzed and used as the basis for additional cost related calculations as is the core purpose for costing estimating. BIM is the future of estimating and the future is here using BIM BIM designs on a commercial level, have been in use for nearly a decade here in the United States. In other parts of the world such as Europe, Australia, Indonesia and China these countries have been actively designing in BIM even longer and in some places, it is mandated for public works and for large municipal construction projects. As good as all this sounds there are a few practical limitations and issues when working in BIM. As a practical matter, not all architects or engineers design in BIM. However, the number that do is exponentially increasing daily. Secondly and common in many projects the BIM are models are often loaded with extraneous design information and often times the information that is available is information is not in the right unit of measure necessary for the calculation of quantities and related costing purposes. Like many things in life BIM models are not always perfect… and even more problematic, BIM models often look correct while the objects contained within the model are incomplete, unorganized and/or provide issue for potential miscalculation. But this is where the capabilities and experience of the TCH Consulting Groups BIM estimators come to the forefront. With few exceptions, we can extract, organize and augment the drawing file’s missing or incomplete object’s properties to generate the correct associated quantities . We can do this all outside of the architect’s original design environment, using Revit’s standard export options. IE: DWF and DWFx, then we efficiently put all this information neatly organized and expertly priced into an Excel spreadsheet or custom report writer environment. At TCH Consulting our BIM capabilities are second to none as we have worked on many large and complicated projects all over the world. The knowledge and experience that our highly skilled BIM estimators have comes from years of hands-on experience using state-of-the- art BIM software’s with the ability to read parametric design models built in a variety of software title such as, Revit, ArchiCAD and Sketch-up. Please, give us a call today and let us know how we can help!