Insights on Model Based Estimating from DPR Construction

AECbytes starts out this month with a 'Building the Future' article entitled "Model Based Estimating to Inform Target Value Design" authored by a team from DPR Construction, a national general contractor and construction management company that is recognized as an industry leader in the use of Lean Construction methods and BIM technologies. The use of Target Value Design (TVD) or Target Costing is one of the focus areas of the application of Lean Construction methods to large healthcare projects. The cardinal rule is that the Target Cost for a project should never be exceeded. In most traditional project delivery approaches, cost follows design, but on projects where the TVD approach is used, cost should dictate what gets designed to ensure that the target cost is not exceeded.  As a result, rapid cost feedback to the design team is paramount. One mechanism for providing this rapid cost feedback is extracting quantities from the virtual model and model-based estimates. This article discusses the lessons currently being learned by the DPR team in applying BIM tools, such as model-based estimating, for TVD on a large healthcare project in Northern California.

This will be followed by a Tips and Tricks article from Jeff Olken of ARCHVISTA Building Technologies entitled "Unlocking Hidden Drafting Power within ArchiCAD." Responding to one of the most common questions from new users getting introduced to BIM, which is how to draft in BIM as quickly as possible, this tutorial shows how to unlock the hidden drafting and modeling controls within ArchiCAD and learn to use them to handle challenging drafting and modeling situations without the time-consuming, inefficient and error-prone method of creating and using temporary construction lines.

Also on the agenda for this month is a Viewpoint article on the ROI of BIM by Dr. Burcin Becerik-Gerber, Assistant Professor in the Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California, and her graduate student, Samara Rice. They discuss the results of a survey carried out for a research project being conducted at USC on the quantifiable Return on Investment (ROI) for the use of BIM in AEC projects. While it is intuitively felt that BIM is lowering costs and making the building industry more productive, what is really needed are models for establishing metrics and benchmarks, so the benefits of BIM can established more definitively.

Do continue to check out the AECbytes Blog for reader comments and the VendorHub to get a consolidated view of all the technology providers in AEC.

Thank you!

Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > August 2009