The NBS National BIM Report 2019 was recently published. The Construction IT Alliance outlines the findings from the first NBS Survey for Ireland and the BIM adoption challenges.
The Construction IT Alliance and NBS undertook their first BIM survey in Ireland, which elicited a total of 116 responses from a diverse mixture of design professionals. The results found that all of the respondents to the Irish BIM survey are aware of BIM; with 76% of respondents having adopted BIM, which is broadly similar to the UK’s adoption levels.
BIM is also being used more often on public sector projects in the area of health but it is less likely to be used on one-off new houses, extensions, conversions, or alteration-type projects. In keeping with the Public Sector, at present 27% of respondents believe that the Irish Government’s BIM adoption Strategy has been very or quite successful, and 44% think that the NBC Roadmap 2018-2021 has been very or quite successful. This is a positive start to a roadmap and strategy even though the NBC Roadmap has not yet attracted any Government funding. The vast majority of professionals stated that they would turn to professional institutes or industry organisations when looking for information about BIM. Most prominent among these are NBS (81%), CitA (79%) and BuildingSMART (68%).
In both the UK and Ireland, design professionals are facing challenges to BIM adoption. In Ireland, the main barriers to BIM adoption are a lack of in-house expertise (74%), no client demand (67%) and a lack of training (67%). While clear procedural challenges were noted in which Ireland needs to overcome for BIM to become fully embedded, respondents, especially those who are already using BIM, recognize the advantages that BIM adoption, such as increases in the coordination of construction documents (83%) and brings cost efficiencies (64%). Perhaps more importantly, though, both current users and non-users believe that clients and contractors will increasingly demand the use of BIM.
The benefits of BIM adoption to the Irish Construction sector are widely recognized due to a number of successful projects that have applied Level 2 BIM processes. There is now an expectation that both clients and contractors will increasingly insist on BIM, and therefore, nine out of ten respondents expect to be using BIM within the next one to five years.
You can download the National BIM Report 2019 from the NBS website: https://www.thenbs.com/knowledge/national-bim-report-2019
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