BIM the key? AEC Firms embrace this new-age Technology with RDT

Construction inefficiencies hindering development?

The construction industry in India is amongst the most inefficient, especially when it comes to small & medium scale projects. According to some estimates, the country loses more than 10 billion dollars a year owing to inefficiencies in the sector. For a developing country like India, that is a fortune that can be deployed somewhere else.

But the real question is, what is the solution? Hire foreign talent? Digitize the process? This is a key question that many firms are trying to answer. Large construction firms in the country have resorted to partnering with large MNCs for project management, which bring in international exposure & far more digitized processes compared to the ones followed in India. However, for the majority of the smaller & medium-sized firms, that is not an option. Needless to say, margin pressure & relatively inexpensive labor are big deterrents for a large number of firms to avoid going ahead with better & more streamlined & digitized processes. So what is the solution?

BIM: The Way Forward

Well, the solution is a fairly straightforward one. BIM or Building Information Modeling is an approach that can reduce inefficiencies in the construction process unlike any other. RDT Technology, a leading BIM service provider in the country, believes that construction costs for small to medium scale projects can be cut by up to 20% & 5-10% for large scale projects.

When you think of construction projects, what comes to mind? Architects & engineers, reviewing large plans to plan & strategize the project? Well, no more! With BIM, the entire project is moved to a cloud environment wherein all the project details, up to even a doorknob, are added to the cloud BIM model. Yes, you heard that right, even a doorknob!

With this technology, AEC firms can fully automate time-taking & highly manual tasks like project estimation, planning & coordination between the trades (mechanical, electrical, plumbing, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, etc.). To give you an idea of how forward-thinking this approach is, imagine a large hospital being built in a city with hundreds of workers on the site. One pipe/trade designed to be in the wrong place can set back the project by months, thus, rendering a large number of workers & a huge amount of capital deployed useless for that period. What BIM does is resolve all the clashes on software before the construction even begins! Thus, avoiding delays which can result in tens of crores of rupees, if not more.

A new approach, a new beginning?

Partners at RDT Technology & fellow architects Dinesh & Aditya are seeing construction firms incorporate this technology in all sorts of projects. Right from metro projects to large-scale public & private projects such as malls, factories, hospitals, and so on and subsequently. “The idea is to keep supply chain & construction inefficiencies to a minimum by digitizing the entire process. Reducing carbon footprint, improving capital management at the project level & maintaining energy efficiency in buildings are important by-products of this process as well,” say enterprising founders of RDT Technology.

The future is digital; the future is virtual; let us see how the world of AEC adopts the new age & marries it with the traditional world of construction & project management.