Quantity surveyors have a proud reputation and powerful skillset for understanding project costs, keeping track of budgets and expenditures, verifying claims, and adding value wherever possible. But our profession, like some other elements of the construction sector, hasn’t fully embraced the digital revolution. These days, staying still means falling behind. It’s been decades since the start of BIM (Building Information Modelling) so it’s high time to adopt, innovate and transform.
Traditionally, quantity surveyors relied on manual processes and paper-based documentation, then gradually switched over to PDFs and spreadsheets, and perhaps dabbled in a bit of 3D modelling. Now, the pace of the digital revolution has accelerated far beyond these early forays. ‘The way we’ve always done it’ might be tried and tested, but it’s inefficient and can’t unlock the full value we could be adding for our clients, industry and society.
BIM is essentially a 3D model of a building that brings all the data together into one context, helping design teams collaborate during the pre-construction phase of a project. A BIM model gets even richer if we add more data and dimensions – such as 4D (time), 5D (cost), 6D (environmental impacts, sustainability and embodied carbon) and 7D (facilities management – allowing us to represent the real building as it evolves into occupancy).
When the BIM model is integrated with data about the structure’s surrounding environment (such as people movement, weather, ground conditions) and data feeds from IoT (Internet of Things) devices in and around the structure itself (such as heating and cooling), a digital twin is born.
With an extra layer of AI (artificial intelligence) using predictive analytics and machine learning, vast amounts of stored data from previous projects can be interrogated to identify patterns, predict outcomes, and indicate micro-level disturbances or disruptions in the expected behaviour of the building that would be very difficult for a human to detect.
BIM and digital twins represent a paradigm shift towards greater efficiency and precision across the sector throughout the entire lifecycle of a building or structure. All consultants and contractors can become more aligned, consistent and productive with fewer errors and less rework. Suddenly we can identify detailed quantities and costs and update them easily as designs evolve and construction progresses.
We can visualise how construction is tracking against schedules and easily identify clashes, delays, shortages of materials or labour, and flow-on implications. Sites can even become safer with automated identification of safety hazards and mitigations. For clients, a new world opens of rapid scenario testing and informed decision making from early planning and concept designs through to completion, operations, maintenance and as far as end-of-life.
The synergy of BIM, IoT, digital twins and AI has the power to create a new environment of collaboration and empowerment. If developers can log into a platform that gives them a rich but intuitive environment to interrogate their own data, they will be empowered to ask questions of their own project, whether that’s about its feasibility at the outset (where should we build? What will it cost? What's the NABERS rating? how can we reduce the carbon footprint?) or how to optimise it for long-term, high-yield occupation. The answers to these questions are sure to lead to better decisions.
Another benefit is that the tone of the budgetary conversation can shift from what can sometimes be adversarial to an atmosphere of collaborative problem-solving to minimise cost and maximise quality.
Quantity surveyors can work more collaboratively with architects, engineers and contractors to identify and address potential issues before they escalate and to uncover opportunities to enhance the overall quality. And, of course, it’s all so much faster – so there’s more capacity to add value.
With so much to gain, digital transformation seems a no-brainer. So what’s holding parts of the industry back from full adoption?
Many of us have hoped for decades that the digital revolution would transform our industry organically over time. Yet even with BIM mandates, such as in the UK, change has been very slow.
The most common factors that hold technological advances back are concerns about intellectual property, data privacy and cybersecurity – but these are fairly easily overcome in our industry. A bigger factor is simply a lack of digital literacy and a reluctance to change. This will shift if we invest strongly in young ‘digital natives’, for whom there’s simply no alternative approach.
In my view, there are two particularly powerful ways we could accelerate the uptake of BIM, IoT and AI: (1) explicitly requiring and embedding the model into the construction contract, and (2) coordinating BIM as a service so that a ‘federated model’ can be kept accurate and up to date, managed by a single party that engages and collaborates with all the consultants and contractors involved in the project. If a federated model is required as the core delivery mechanism of the contract, change will happen.
The quantity surveyor is an excellent candidate for managing the federated model. After all, since the job began, we’ve been the party ensuring that our clients spend their money wisely and get value for money and a quality result. The problem is that we’ve all been so busy poring over our spreadsheets that we haven’t taken the time to look up and look out to new horizons.
There’s no doubt that digital transformation is complex and demands a real commitment to innovation and continuous learning. To share data and collaborate in the digital realm, the whole industry will need to trust the models and the processes behind them. The benefits – lower costs, greater quality, less risk and more sustainability – are undeniable and well worth the investment. As trusted advisors, it’s time for quantity surveyors to get ahead of the curve and invite others to join the journey.
By Ian Baddock,WT Australia’s Chief Information Officer.
Image: Shutterstock
